How can Gamification Improve MOOC Student Engagement?

How can Gamification Improve MOOC Student Engagement?

Khalil, M.F.D. (TU Delft Web Information Systems)
Ebner, Martin (Graz University of Technology)
Admiraal, Wilfried (Universiteit Leiden)

Pivec, M. (editor)
Grundler, J. (editor)

2017-10-04

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) require students’ motivation either intrinsically or extrinsically to complete any of its courses. Even though MOOCs enjoy great popularity and bring many benefits to the educational community, some concerns arise with MOOC advancement. In fact, MOOCs are affected by low completion rate and face issues with respect to interactivity and student engagement along MOOC duration, which may convert student excitement to boredom and then drop out at any stage. A key result of research in the past couple of years has proved that students’ engagement in MOOCs is strongly related to their activities online. These activities are related to the interaction between student and logging in the MOOC, reading and writing in the MOOC discussion forum, watching videos and doing quizzes. In this research paper, we present our research in deploying a gamification mechanic in MOOCs to increase student engagement. The gamification approach relies on weekly feedback to drive student intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Following learning analytics on students’ data from a MOOC offered in 2014, 2015, and 2016, the outcome of this approach showed an obvious increase in students’ activity and engagement in discussion forums, login frequency and quiz trials. The active students’ cohort allotment has increased in comparison with previous versions of the same MOOC as well as the completion rate has incremented up to 26% of the total number of participants.

gamification
massive open online courses (MOOCs)
learning analytics
motivation
retention
dropout

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4da4de73-d7a4-4a81-825d-70569e12fff9

Curran Associates, Inc., New York

978-1-5108-5044-6

11th European Conference on Game Based Learning (ECGBL 2017), 1

11th European Conference on Games Based Learning, ECGBL 2017, 2017-10-05 → 2017-10-06, Graz, Austria

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2017 M.F.D. Khalil, Martin Ebner, Wilfried Admiraal