Personalization of Gamification in Collaborative Learning Contexts using Ontologies

Abstract

The design of collaborative learning (CL) scenarios that increase both students' learning and motivation is a challenge that the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) community has been addressing in the past few years. On one hand, CSCL design (i.e. scripts) has shown to be an effective approach to support meaningful interactions and better learning. On the other hand, scripted collaboration sometimes decrease motivation of students to participate in the CL process, which makes more difficult the use of group activities over time. To deal with the problem of motivation, researchers and educators are now looking at Gamification techniques to engage students. Gamification in education is a complex task that requires, from instructional designers, knowledge about game elements (such as leaderboards and point systems), game design (how to combine game elements) and their impact on motivation and learning. To help the adequate use of gamification in collaborative learning activities we have applied ontological engineering techniques to develop an Ontology called OntoGaCLeS in order to formalize the representation of gamification concepts and explain how they affect motivation in CL situations. This paper will present the ontological structure to represent gamified CL scenarios and show the utility of our approach to define personalized conceptual models to gamify CL scenario based on students' needs and individual characteristics.