Coming Fall 2021: OU's First Esports Course
By Chelsey Kraft
Gaylord College prides itself on providing real-world experiences to students to best prepare them for their careers. A new partnership with OU’s Esports and Co-Curricular Innovation Department will provide these opportunities in a quickly growing realm - esports.
The OU Esports Club, recently renamed the OU Gaming Club, was established in fall 2017 and is the largest student organization on campus with more than 2,200 members. It is a diverse organization, with students from every academic college and a range of backgrounds and student types represented.
“Gaming is another universal language, like food,” said Michael Agular, director of OU Esports and Co-Curricular Innovation. “The Nintendo brand is universal, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ is universal and some of these more viral esports titles are universal. That can be a great conduit to help break ice and form camaraderie in traditional demographic differences that you would typically not align with, but it's the whole point of coming to universities like ours.”
The student organization features a six-pillar infrastructure of leadership development, community, media and news, production, streaming entertainment and intercollegiate esports. Last fall, OU Esports and Co-Curricular Innovation was added within the Division of Student Affairs and tasked with three mandates: to develop co-curricular programming, generate revenue and start academic curriculum and research discovery phases.
That final area is where Gaylord College and the department will be working hand-in-hand. This fall, Agular will teach a practicum for creative media production majors focused on live streaming production.
For the practicum course, Agular said he plans to focus on historical information about the industry and its tools, and then he will have students practice becoming an influencer-style streamer. Although they won’t be required to stream live, Agular will encourage students to do so in order to learn the production process behind a livestream.
“The livestream practicum is focused on taking those core fundamentals on how the gaming industry has approached this topic versus the more corporate and television broadcast standards and style,” explained Agular, who has also visited the introductory media course for the past few semesters to cover the chapter on gaming. “The beauty of technology is it has allowed us to have software and hardware that is very affordable to make well-polished livestream productions.”
Agular said there are still traditional broadcast approaches involved with live streaming, including generating ad revenue.
Esports is only going to continue to grow at OU. The plan is to have a dedicated esports venue on campus, which would also include production space. The next class on Agular’s radar is an intro to esports course, and the plan is to keep growing the curriculum from there - not just
within Gaylord College but also within the Price College of Business, the Gibbs College of Architecture and the OU Honors College, to name a few.
While the addition of curriculum is still in the early stages, Agular said the goal is to also offer esports minors in a few years followed by majors in areas such as esports management and media. This approach will also fit within OU’s strategic plan, which is placing an emphasis on building trans-curricular programming that leverages expertise across campus.
“There aren’t really many departments on campus that this can't integrate with in some way,” Agular said. “What industry doesn't need legal counsel, as much as we wish we didn't have it but we're glad it's here? It's already a champion of DEI by nature. By definition, it is an equalizer for gender, it is an equalizer for race, heritage, discipline and everything in between.”
"Gaming is another universal language, like food. The Nintendo brand is universal, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ is universal and some of these more viral esports titles are universal. That can be a great conduit to help break ice and form camaraderie in traditional demographic differences that you would typically not align with, but it's the whole point of coming to universities like ours.” - Michael Agular, director of OU Esports and Co-Curricular Innovation
