Abstract:With the implementation of the Bologna Process several challenges have been posed to higher education institution, particularly in Portugal. One of the main implications is related to the change of the paradigm of a teacher centered education, to a paradigm that is student centered. This change implies the change of the way to assess courses in higher education institutions. Continuous and formative assessments emerged as the focus, catalyzed by electronic assessment, or e-assessment. This paper presents a case of the implementation of an e-assessment strategy, implemented in order to allow continuous, formative assessment in numerous mathematics classes using multiple-choice questions tests implement in Moodle open-source learning management system. The implementation can be considered a success.
Nowadays the use of the information and communication technologies (ICT) is more and more common in the learning and teaching process. Modern forms of education have risen and these require the implementation of new learning paradigms: situated cognition, student-centred learning, distributed cognition, constructivism, and communities of practice, among others. However there is an important problem that concerns educators, the lack of student motivation and engagement in education, especially in the e-learning environment (Online Education, Online Courses), where the motivation and the active role of students are definitely the key. Therefore, the interest of researchers in the subject of gamification, which main pillars are motivation, progressiveness and instant feedback, has increased. Furthermore, influence of gamification, depending on utilized components (challenge, curiosity, competion, recognition, etc) may have different effects on students. Thus, there is a need of deeper understanding of dependencies between engagement and implemented gamification elements. The goal of such analysis could be personalization of an e-learning system based on a model that enables management of gamification process individually for every student.The purpose of this paper is to investigate how gamification affects a Mathematics Online Course that is using this model as a pedagogical strategy. It relates such strategy with active learning practices and discusses its effectiveness, investigating how gamification can motivate students to participate more deeply and even to change their self-concept as learners. Moreover, the learning analytics and data analysis shows that implementation of the gamification components contributes to the engagement of students in an e-learning environment, having a positive impact on the final grade.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.