In this article, I describe my approach to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of synchronous online teaching during the Fall semester of 2020 in the specific context of a 90-student graduate course in Healthcare Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Online teaching at higher educational institutions has become a much higher priority in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, but most faculty and staff at these institutions are ill-prepared to adapt their teaching methods and content to this new medium. In this article, we describe our approach to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of synchronous online teaching by borrowing ideas and tools from the gaming community. The gamification of education is a well- known concept, but we found few applications in higher-education settings to rely on when we were forced to move online in March 2020. We hope to remedy this gap by providing colleagues with a step-by-step guide to setting up their own home studios, including a complete listing of the software and hardware that we use and how we use them in three distinct online teaching applications: a large (90-student) graduate healthcare finance course at MIT, an even larger (200- student) undergraduate statistics course at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and a medium- sized (50-student) graduate operations management course at MIT.