Gamified Collaborative Environment in Moodle

Hasan Fahmi Hasan,Muesser Nat,Vanye Zira Vanduhe

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2926622

Abstract

Higher education institutions are struggling to enhance teaching and learning processes to support students' needs in this information age. In the last few years, gamification has been widely used to improve learning experiences in various environments. Education is one of the fields that adopted gamification as technological innovation to increase student engagement since it plays a critical role in higher education, especially in digital learning environments. Today, learning management systems (LMSs) are commonly used to facilitate learning processes. However, the engagement and the motivation of students when using such systems require extra attention. There is a need for an instructor to incorporate digital technologies with esteemed innovations to create an engaging learning environment. Increasing students' engagement is said to be evidence of increased learning. Therefore, this paper addresses these challenges by designing, developing, and evaluating a gamified collaborative discussion environment on the moodle LMS. To achieve this, the students in a postgraduate course used a gamified online discussion environment for eight weeks during group work to complete their term projects. Students' online learning pre-test and post-test data are utilized to investigate students' engagement in a gamified discussion environment. The results illustrate that there is a significant difference between pre-test and post-test results, which shows that the gamified online discussion environment has improved students' engagement. Furthermore, students that highly accessed the online course activities had a good engagement, which motivated students to conduct online collaboration according to the game-feature context.

Highlights

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are effectively used in higher education
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF GAMIFIED MOODLE ENVIRONMENT The gamified online discussion environment that was developed for this study consists of the discussion board, which includes posting, reading, updating and commenting; and the features that were developed based on the gamification features, such as experience points, badges, progress bars, leaderboards, and awards, which are used to measured its impact on students’ engagement
The t-test is used to compare the pre- and post-test results to assess if the gamified online discussion environment impacted student engagement

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are effectively used in higher education. The improvement of students’ engagement in higher education is perceived as a perennial problem since the format of the classroom teaching environment is not recognized as an interactive environment that promotes active participation and engagement. The main benefits of online discussions include the promotion of a sense of community through the learners, sharing knowledge, the development of higher-level thinking and improving active participation and student engagement. The instructors tend to develop the gamified approach to support student collaboration, participation, and sharing their experiences with their peers. Increasing the potential to improve student engagement and motivation encourages researchers to develop and adopt gamification in educational contexts with various approaches [11]. We demonstrate the implementation of a gamified Moodle and how to increase engagement in online discussion environments in higher education

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT IN ONLINE DISCUSSION ENVIRONMENTS

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF GAMIFIED MOODLE ENVIRONMENT

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY