Despite the benefits of MOOCs (e.g., open access to education offered by prestigious universities), the low level of student engagement remains as an important issue causing massive dropouts in such courses. The use of reward-based gamification strategies is one approach to promote student engagement and prevent dropout. However, there is a lack of solid empirical studies analyzing the effects of rewards in MOOC environments. This paper reports a between-subjects design study conducted in a MOOC to analyze the effects of badges and redeemable rewards on student retention and engagement. Results show that the implemented reward strategies had not significant effect on student retention and behavioral engagement measured through the number of pageviews, task submissions, and student activity time. However, it was found that learners able to earn badges and redeemable rewards participated more in gamified tasks than those learners in the control group. Additionally, results reveal that the participants in the redeemable reward condition requested and earned earlier the rewards than those participants in the badge condition. The potential implications of these findings in the instructional design of future gamified MOOCs are also discussed.
Although MOOCs are being established as a very popular technology to support learning, they are often criticized for their lack of support to active pedagogies and the high drop-out rates. One approach to face this problem is gamification, due to the promising benefits already shown at small-scale environments. Attending to the current and growing use of game elements in MOOCs, this paper presents a systematic literature review of the usage of gamification in MOOCs, aimed at analyzing how gamification is being implemented in MOOCs, and to identify unexplored research opportunities in this field. The results show that gamification is still at an early stage in MOOCs, and it is being implemented in similar ways to those at small scale contexts.
Despite the advantages of MOOCs, such as the open and free access to education, these courses are criticized for students' lack of motivation and their high dropout rates. Gamification is a technique used to increase student motivation and engagement in smallscale educational contexts. However, the effects of gamification on student engagement have been scarcely explored in MOOC environments, and the findings so far are inconsistent. To address this gap, this research work examines the students' behavior towards earning badges and how it relates to their engagement in a gamified MOOC. According to the results, the behaviors towards badges of the active students were generally positive and significantly correlated with other variables measuring their engagement (e.g., pageviews, submitted tasks, forum posts), although this positive behavior seems to decrease throughout the course. Additionally, students that reported high motivation by badges at the end of the course showed a higher engagement level than those that were not appealed by badges.
Gamification strategies have been proposed to mitigate student disengagement and dropouts in massive online environments, due to the positive results shown by these strategies at lower scales. Among various gamification strategies, redeemable rewards have been identified as an effective element to intrinsically motivate students and increase their engagement in educational settings, including MOOCs. Yet, effective design, implementation and enactment of this gamification strategy in MOOC contexts might face new challenges, given the unique characteristics of these learning settings such as massiveness. As an attempt to help teachers use redeemable rewards in MOOCs, this paper analyzes the characteristics of MOOCs that influence its integration and presents a proposal of a system supporting the design, implementation and enactment of such rewards. The envisioned system is illustrated by a scenario that describes the main features of this system for teachers and students.
Despite the success of MOOCs to promote open leaning, they are usually criticized for their high drop-out rates and behaviorist pedagogical approach. Some active learning strategies, such as collaboration and gamification, have shown their potential to overcome some of these problems at low scale. However, the design and implementation of such strategies in MOOCs is still a challenge, which is being studied by several researchers, who tend to focus specially on the enactment of MOOCs. Therefore, there is a need for research studies exploring the design processes of MOOCs including active strategies. In this paper, we describe a co-redesign process in which an economic translation course conceived as a MOOC but finally implemented in Moodle for blended learning, was redesigned to include collaboration and gamification to implement it in Canvas Network (a MOOC platform). During the redesign process we found severe difficulties related to the scale, which were mainly caused by the initial implementation in a typical LMS.
Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been reported as an effective educational tool offering numerous opportunities in online learning, the high dropout rates and the lack of learners' motivation are factors concerning researchers and instructors. The one-size-fits-all instructional approach that most courses follow, failing to address the individual needs of learners, has been seen as their weakest point. Recent efforts focus on the inclusion of active learning pedagogies in MOOCs to stimulate the interaction among the participants and to keep them engaged. However, taking into account that in these massive contexts the learners face several issues while trying to keep up with the course, the incorporation of active learning strategies may introduce additional problems to the learning process. This study explores the problems that learners experienced in a MOOC implementing collaboration and gamification strategies. As the results reveal, the introduction of collaborative learning activities can generate additional problems to learners and for that reason, a careful design and a proper scaffolding is needed in an early stage to overcome the problems that will occur. No significant problems were reported regarding the implementation of gamification elements.
In spite of the high impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), learners frequently disengage from the course contents and activities due to unexpected problems of different natures, such as content-related or technical issues. Feedback has been identified as an important aspect of the learning process directly connected with learners' engagement. However, the massive and impersonal nature of MOOCs hinders the provision of efficient and timely feedback to those learners facing problems. This paper examines how MOOC practitioners identify and support learners facing problems, what challenges they encounter, and what strategies they apply to overcome such challenges.Additionally, the current study aims to compare the learners' problems and practitioners' experiences between engineering-related and nonengineering related MOOCs. A qualitative phenomenological study has been conducted through semistructured interviews with 14 MOOC practitioners. The evidence gathered shows diverse learners' and practitioners' problems shared among engineering and nonengineering courses and a general concern on how to address individual learners' needs in time. A common practice of problem identification regards checking the self-reported issues in communication forums. Identification strategies with the use of learning analytics are limited due to platform restrictions or lack of practitioners' skills in interpreting the provided information. The synthesis of MOOC practitioners from both engineering and nonengineering disciplines may provide insights that are either globally applicable to all disciplines or specific to engineering. The results could be shaped into conceptual and technological solutions to help MOOC stakeholders (e.g., researchers, practitioners) identify potential learners facing difficulties and support them during the course process.
Abstract-Integration of collaborative learning in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is an open research challenge.However, team formation and subsequent management are complex tasks that depend on multiple factors, both pedagogical and technological. To fulfill these tasks, it would be helpful to provide teachers with supporting tools. This paper analyzes the factors influencing the formation of teams in MOOCs that can be taken into consideration in the design of this type of supporting tools. The paper presents a proposed classification and illustrates their need and utility by a scenario.
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