Abstract
This study aims to examine whether it is possible to match digital society, academia and students interests in higher education by testing to what extent the introduction of gamification into active learning setups affects the skills development demanded by the workplace of the digital society of the twenty-first century, the academic achievement standards claimed by the academia, and the satisfaction with the learning process required by the students. Our results provide statistically significant empirical evidence, concluding that the generation of a co-creative and empowered gameful experience that supports students' overall value creation yields to satisfactory active learning setups without any loss of academic achievement, and allowing to develop a series of skills especially relevant for twenty-first century professionals.
Highlights
The preponderance of digital technology characterizes the society of the twenty-first century
No matter how many of its advantages in terms of academic achievement and skills development, it will be doomed to failure. With all this background and taking into account the interests, doubts and demands of the three stakeholders related to the higher education system: digital society, academia and students, the objective of this article is to analyze whether it is possible to create active learning experiences in higher education that allow the development of the skills demanded by the workplace of the digital society of the twenty-first century, without affecting the quality training and learning standards required by the academia, neither the satisfaction generated in the students by involving them in the active creation of their own knowledge
This section is organized into two subsections: first, we examine the measurement models, where appropriate, of the scales defined in the previous subsection: the students’ skills, the students’ academic achievement, and the students’ satisfaction, in order to determine whether they are reliable and valid scales following established procedures (Hair et al 2017a, b)
Summary
The preponderance of digital technology characterizes the society of the twenty-first century. The new professionals must get used to working in multidisciplinary teams and environments, where over-specialization in a specific subject is not so much valued as their initiative to learn from an open and holistic perspective (Muduli 2018; Zhu et al 2019) In this context, the university of the twenty-first century is configured as the field of practice where to simulate this work scenario through active learning strategies that, promoting quality technical training, allow the development of the skills demanded by the actual workplace (Mora et al 2020). Murillo‐Zamorano et al Int J Educ Technol High Educ (2021) 18:15 transmitter of knowledge but as a facilitator or guide of that learning (Bonwell and Eison, 1991) Active learning promotes their creativity, helping them to develop the skills that increasingly determine their future employability and personal development (Daellenbach, 2018; Hayter and Parker 2019; Pang et al 2019). The Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA; Zahavi and Friedman 2019), the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21; van Laar et al 2017) or the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S; Care et al 2018) are examples of international conceptual learning frameworks that highlight the usefulness of active learning for the development of skills associated with content-knowledge learning required for students to succeed in the fast-changing digital society of the twenty-first century
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