Gamification has recently been presented as a successful strategy to engage users, with potential for online education. However, while the number of publications on gamification has been increasing in recent years, a classification of its empirical effects is still missing. We present a systematic literature review conducted with the purpose of closing this gap by clarifying what effects gamification generates on users’ behaviour in online learning. Based on the studies analysed, the game elements most used in the literature are identified and mapped with the effects they produced on learners. Furthermore, we cluster these empirical effects of gamification into six areas: performance, motivation, engagement, attitude towards gamification, collaboration, and social awareness. The findings of our systematic literature review point out that gamification and its application in online learning and in particular in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are still a young field, lacking in empirical experiments and evidence with a tendency of using gamification mainly as external rewards. Based on these results, important considerations for the gamification design of MOOCs are drawn.

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract-Gamification in engineering education has been applied with success in the last years. Also, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are recognized as a good strategy to enhance engineering education. Nevertheless, MOOCs have two main weaknesses: first, lack of addressing personal goals; and second, low completion rates in comparison to the number of registrations to the MOOCs. To improve learning experiences in MOOCs and to strengthen self-regulated personalized learning we propose the application of gamification in MOOCs. Our assumption is that MOOC learners will better succeed in achieving their goals if they can individually personalize and plan their learning paths through gamification. This assumption is based on the implementation intention theory which claims that people who foster their goal intentions with implementation intentions are comparatively more successful in their personal goal achievements. Based on a preliminary literature review this article presents and arguments on our research idea on how to apply gamification to enhance MOOC users' goal achievement. Besides, it introduces a new perspective on MOOC completion rates based on the user intention and a new way of measuring it via the Personal Goal Achievement Ratio (PGAR) and the Overall Goal Achievement Ratio (OGAR).

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.