Gamifying massive online courses: effects on the social networks and course completion rates

• Autor(a) principal: Marcos, Luis de
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Garcia-Cabot, Antonio, Garcia-Lopez, Eva, Ramirez-Velarde, Raul, Teixeira, António, Martínez-Herráiz, José-Javier
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/14960
• topic: e-Learning; Online learning; Online course; Gamification; Educational social networks; Social network analysis; Course completion; Educational innovation; Higher education; ODS::04:Educação de Qualidade

This paper analyzes the e ects 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 di erences 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.