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Does Gamification in MOOC Discussion Forums Work?

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of learning environment aimed towards accessibility and openness using contemporary technologies. One of the MOOC’s key features is the social interaction which usually takes place in discussion forums. This article focuses on reworking and analyzing the existing iMooX forum by enriching the new design with gamifi-cation elements. The intended objectives aim at refreshing the current style and improving its handling and usability. This article provides our experience of this implementation as well as examining whether or not the gamification ele-ments can help increase the participation rate and the teacher-to-student and student-to-student communication exchange. Results of the new design showed a good user satisfaction and a slight positive impact.
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... It also evaluated gamification effects on several factors like engagement, motivation, participation rate, homework performance, and students' interaction patterns and satisfaction. [5], [6], [7], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23]. Understanding student bevaviour [4], [11], [21], [24], [25]. ...
... Some studies developed tools or adopted open source plugins for LA. For example, [10] developed an algorithm for badges calculation as indicators, and [18], [22] offered a complete logging system for all MOOC variables in iMooX through (iLAP) tool to categorize students according to their activities. ...
Conference Paper
The growing adoption of learning analytics (LA) approaches and data mining (DM) techniques using educational gamification data sets is reflected in increased publications on this topic. However, with different gamified contexts and a variety of LA methods available, no comprehensive review summarized the obtained findings. Therefore, this research aims to identify studies' characteristics, objectives, and methods used in gamification learning analytics (GaLA) research. To identify these, this study comprehensively reviewed the literature of 24 studies selected from an initial pool of 221 search results. The findings show that GaLA methods can be categorized into: visualization, data mining, social network analysis (SNA), statistics, and correlations. In conclusion, GaLA is defined as a data-driven approach using various methods of data analysis and mining techniques in gamified contexts for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data to assess or enhance the gameful experience, understand student behaviour, and improve learning outcomes.
... Watson et al. (2016) stated that the combination of MOOCs content, technology and a variety of instructor-led activities can help to accomplish teaching objectives effectively. However, previous research showed that the forum discussion in most MOOC platforms lacked student engagement (Reischer et al., 2017). Less than 5 % of the students interacted with other students in the online forum (Breslow et al., 2013;Rosé et al., 2014). ...
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... Perceiving the presence of others online is not an inherent characteristic of MOOC platforms, where usually the only 'social' feature, the only 'social affordance 1 ', available is the discussion forum [4]. Several studies have investigated how forums should be designed to foster user engagement [4,5], but only few have considered to include and design solutions, for generating a SoC among MOOC users in order to raise engagement levels [6]. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
Over the past few years, massive online open courses (MOOCs) have been increasingly identified as technologies that could transform education, by providing free and high-quality content to anyone with an Internet connection. However, despite these potentials, MOOCs generally fail to keep their participants on board. One of the reasons for this phenomenon can lie in a lack of participants’ engagement. Social presence and sense of community (SoC) theories claim that a user in an online shared environment may feel more engaged if s/he perceives the others as ‘real persons’ and feels part of a community. Therefore, we developed our game elements with the purpose of developing social presence and SoC among MOOC users. The results of our experiment, from one side, show that our gamification design did positively impact users’ development of social presence and SoC, as well as their learning performance. From the other, data did not confirm that higher levels of social presence and SoC corresponded to higher engagement of MOOC users. These results have important implications for the field by enriching it with a more technologically enhanced approach towards implementing gamification, and by augmenting the social potentials of MOOCs.
... Badges were awarded for students' basic actions such as creating an account, receiving "likes" or marking forum threads as favorite. Although the results showed a high level of user satisfaction, the reading and writing levels in the discussion forums decreased in comparison with the previous non-gamified version of the same course [49]. ...
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Incl. bibl., index, URL adresses
Learning about Social Learning in MOOCs: From Statistical Analysis to Generative Model
  • C G Brinton
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  • H Liu
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Brinton, C. G., G., Chiang, M., Jain, S., Lam, H., Liu, Z. & Wong, F. M. F.: Learning about Social Learning in MOOCs: From Statistical Analysis to Generative Model. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES. Vol 7. No 4 (2014).
  • P Gunawardhana
  • S Palaniappan
Gunawardhana, P. & Palaniappan, S.: Gamification. Vol. 3. Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences (JAAS), Issue 02, 51-58 (2005): AROPUB.