Improving undergraduate soft skills using m-learning and serious games

Abstract

Soft skills such as effective communication are becoming increasingly important for engineering graduates. Employers prize excellent written and oral abilities and literacy proficiency. High levels of academic literacy can significantly improve students' success in their university study. Traditional approaches to literacy improvement can limit student engagement. However, mobile learning and the use of smart phone apps present new opportunities to support literacy education. This paper describes current work exploring the use of apps, as serious games, to improve literacy in undergraduate students and outlines initial results from a cross-discipline evaluation of an m-learning literacy app.

Soft skills in personnel training: Report of publications in scopus, topics explored and future research agenda

“…The assessment allows multiplayer-virtual games to become potential soft skills training mechanisms aimed at students specializing in digital games. Other documents related to this theme were found [ 67 , 69 , 70 ].…”

A Review of Data Analysis for Gamification: Challenges, Motivations, Recommendations and Methodological Aspects

“…al., 2017),framework and ethical guide to gamification (Gallagher et. al., 2019;Hamada & Wakabayashi, 2014), development of apps to improve undergraduates' apps (Smith et. al., 2015;Kirci&Kahraman, 2015;Frank & Philipp, 2016), demonstration of higher achievement based on gamification (Byun &Joung, 2018; Glowacki, Yelizaveta & Nataliya, 2018), gamification increase students' engagement (Aktekin, Celebi&Aktekin, 2018;Turan&Meral, 2018;Cook, Gremo& Morgan, 2017;, positive communication (Ouariachi et.…”

“…Among some of the influential recommendations include to shift focus and rely less on quantitative studies and conduct more studies specifically on mix-methods (Tantawi, Sadaf &Alhumaid, 2016; Alsawaler, 2019), propose critical enquiry as a new of methodology for studies related to data mining, texts, translation, libraries, climate change, ideologies, museum, that require fusion of game elements to attract learners' attention (Cengiz, Birant&Derya, 2017;Ouariachiet al, 2017;Swiatek&Gorsse, 2016;Kidd, 2015;Inwood, 2014;O'Hagan, 2012;), to add suitable evaluation processes to test outcomes obtained from the research conducted to monitor behaviour . Among hot topics that need more attention specifically under serious games to focus social well-being of elderly people (Jinhui et al, 2018), to conduct more exploratory studies (Kelley & Johnston, 2015), recommendation to have more governance platforms for serious games for citizens (Kelley &Johnstoon, 2015), careful development of gamification that retains its values (Marini et al, 2018;Raftopoulos, 2014), provide clear and direct guidelines to develop successful serious games (Hamada& Wakabayashi,2014), development of mlearning to support literacy education (Smith et al, 2015), mobile education for primary school students (Kirci&Kahraman, 2015), generate innovative approaches in education with gamification (Birch & Earl, 2017; Głowacki,Kriukova&Avshenyuk,2018; Hung, 2018), more rigorous study designs required to examine the effectiveness of gamification and benefits that can gained (Tantawi, Sadaf &Alhumaid, 2016;, behaviour change to improve health outcomes (Gallagher et al, 2019;Edwards et al, 2016), to conduct more studies infusing games and electric energy consumption (Nishida & Braga, 2015), educational psychology modelling learners' personalities (Denden et al, 2018), effects of gamification on society and culture (Lifaniva, 2016) and to strike balance between content of the course and game elements (Inwood, 2014).…”