Gamification of MOOCs Adopting Social Presence and Sense of Community to Increase User’s Engagement: An Experimental Study

Abstract

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.

Gamifire - A Scalable, Platform-Independent Infrastructure for Meaningful Gamification of MOOCs

“…Group awareness and team interactions were at the focus of this version, requiring fast updates and exchange of status information, activities, and communication, to allow Gamifire to keep group members informed about other group members' activities and states in close to real-time. This focus required us to balance server communication load, caching mechanisms, and load balancing mechanisms to allow fast communication without increasing server load too much [3].…”

Students’ perceptions of the peer-feedback experience in MOOCs

“…Future research in MOOCs could consider the possible advantages of mandatory participation for a given set of activities for students who opt for a certificate (Keppell et al, 2006). Alternatively, it might be interesting to see if student engagement in MOOCs and peer-feedback (training) can be enhanced using gamification elements to foster engagement, social presence, and sense of community (Antonaci et al, 2019).…”

Scaffolding Social Presence in MOOCs

“…However, behaviour analytic research constantly provides evidence for lack of social presence in existing MOOC designs [15]. As a solution, researchers found peer support in forum [2], effective platform designs, including gamification [1] or off-platform social mechanisms [18] may provide potential for MOOCs to bring social presence. Yet, social presence in MOOCs has been underserved in terms of understanding effective interventions and scaling it and such intervention needs pedagogical changes to MOOCs -sometimes extra infrastructure support since existing MOOC platform designs do not provide affordance for such features.…”

“…Analysing forum discourse leveraged Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) 1 . ENA is a quantitative ethnographic method and generally used to operationalize the building of the knowledge in qualitative data [20].…”

“…In MOOCs, student interactions are often limited to the space in the forum, yet researchers have repeatedly claimed forums are either disorganized, unused or lead to chaos with massive discourses [7]. On the other hand, researchers claim -for a better learning experience, social interactions are crucial and MOOCs are notoriously labeled as being lacking in social presence [1]. Social Presence is the sense of having a real person in the community leading to enhanced learning experience.…”