Gamifying Massive Online Courses: Effects on the Social Networks and Course Completion Rates

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effects of gamification in the social network of a massive online course. An educational social-networking platform gathered information about the contributions of participants and about the social networks that were formed during the course. A gamification layer with three game elements (points, badges, and leaderboard) was then implemented in the online learning platform. Social network analysis (SNA) and principal component analysis (PCA) were used to analyze the differences between a treatment and a comparison group (N = 591 and N = 427), using a set of 20 variables for each participant which quantified contributions to the learning platform as well as position and influence in the social network. The results of SNA show that gamification influences the structure of the social network of the course. The results also suggest that the variables cluster similarly for each group and that the linear combination of variables called the first component (F1) is a good descriptor of students’ work and position in the network. F1 can be used to build predictive models of course completion. The models show that the probability of passing the course increases more rapidly in the treatment (gamified) group.

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“…Em ambientes digitais, as mídias sociais exploradas por estudantes (e docentes em conexões com aprendizagem formal) têm se mostrado viáveis para promover episódios de aprendizagem, a partir de trocas produtivas eventuais mas desejáveis, inclusive para educac ¸ão superior [Almeida et al 2015, Figueira and Oliveira 2016, Valletta 2018, de Marcos-Ortega et al 2020.…”

Caution with competitive gamification in medical education: unexpected results of a randomised cross-over study

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