Gamification Techniques in E-Learning

The field of gamification seeks to apply game mechanics and game design techniques, such as incorporating challenges and rewards to encourage more engaged participation [86]. Gamification techniques strive to leverage people's basic desires and needs that revolve around thoughts on competition, status, self- expression, achievement and community collaboration. In academia, gamification has been defined as the practice of utilising game design elements in non-game contexts [49]. Different from a traditional digital game, gamification incorporates game thinking [194] (game-like approach to aesthetics and usability) and game elements [2] (elements from computer games, such as avatars, badges, goal settings, progression bars, countdown, urgent optimism, behavioural momentum, and appointments) in a non-game system, and aims to achieve some goals such as learning and marketing, other than just entertaining players. Gamification differs

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from serious games [178] that themselves are similar to traditional digital games, but also have defined purposeful goals, such as learning outcomes.

The aim of gamification is to engage desirable behaviours and to achieve the designed goals, or to fulfil an experiencing purpose. For instance, Nwplyng1 rewards users for identifying and sharing what music they are listening to with friends via Facebook and Twitter with badges. Viggle2 rewards users for watching television and sharing their favourite shows with their friends. FuelGood3 _gamifies

the driving process and motivates users to reduce their carbon footprint by tracking users’ driving and offering tips on how to improve gas mileage. Foursquare4 _uses

badges and leaderboards to encourage users to visit different places and report what places they have visited.

In the e-learning area, researchers have been investigating the impact of gamification on the learner experience, especially its impact on learners’ engagement and motivation. For example, Comtella [33] is a small-scale peer-to- peer online community for sharing academic papers and class-related web- resources among students. It has an adaptive reward mechanism to encourage learners to rate contributions, thus ensuring decentralised community moderation.

1 _nwplyng.com 2 _{viggleinc.com} 3 _{fuelgood.co.uk} 4 _{foursquare.com} 5 _{http://yiiframework.com} 6 _{http://getbootstrap.com} 7 _{https://github.com/aslanshek/topolor}

8 _{PK (Player killing): in a Player(s) Versus Player(s) (PvP) gaming environment,}

PK means one player attack another without warning. This can result in a character's death [11].

2 _{viggleinc.com} 3 _{fuelgood.co.uk} 4 _{foursquare.com}

QizBox [63] provides a learning platform that encourages social engagement from learners. It has a level-based progression mechanism, which is based on five specialisations, in which learners can gain experience points. This mechanism helps to encourage five separate types of behaviours identified in using the system, i.e., social, intelligent, helpful, inquisitive, and hardworking, so as to allow learners to have a sense of freedom and an ability to customise their experience within the system to their own personality. Classroom Live [58] is a gamified online tool used in computer science classes for undergraduate students. It takes into consideration various game design elements including points, levels and rewards, aiming at providing enjoyable learner experiences and increasing students’ engagement. WeBWorK [68] is an online system where students access their homework and submit answers. It allows learners to earn levelling/experience points by correctly answering homework questions; it also provides a progress bar to heighten the sense of accomplishment and notification mechanism to instant feedback of learner achievement. Schoooools [175] is a social gamification online learning system that promotes collaboration and socialisation using game mechanics. It provides necessary tools to build the gamified learning process by, e.g., allowing the teacher to personalise and adapt badges, trophies or virtual goods, or the kind of rewards that students can get. These systems inspire the work presented in this thesis, such as the design of gamified social interactions, further described in section 6.3.

However, gamification has been criticised for its overjustification effect, which occurs when an expected external incentive de-motivates learners with already existing high intrinsic motivation [70]. It is believed that people could end up

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paying more attention to external rewards than internal enjoyment and pleasure obtained from the activity itself [123]. Moreover, evidence suggests that increased extrinsic motivation might reduce learning performance [65]. Therefore, the work presented in this thesis intends to explore a light gamification approach that applies motivation theories to promote intrinsic motivation, hosted in a social personalised adaptive e-learning systems, rather than a full-fledged gamification approach that may ‘over-gamify’ the already existing learning community.

Motivation is an inner drive, e.g., desires and goals that activate, energise and direct behaviours. It corresponds to physiological processes, which influence directions and persistence of behaviours [118]. In e-learning, motivation plays an essential role in the success of the learning process. It initiates, guides and maintains efficient goal-oriented behaviours, in order to effectively achieve learning goals [1]. Social e-learning systems allow learners to take a self- motivating role in determining their own learning paths, using social web tools for connecting to each other. They allow for information discovery and sharing, information collection and personalisation [115], yet require special support for this self-determined approach.

Among motivation theories applied in learning, Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is an empirical one that focuses on the degree to which individual behaviours are self-determined and self-motivated [144]. It states that an individual becomes increasingly self-determined and self-motivated when they are satisfied with three basic innate needs, i.e., autonomy, competence and relatedness [144]. A social

personalised adaptive e-learning system that can satisfy all these three basic innate needs is expected to sustainably increase learners’ intrinsic motivation, leading to an efficient self-determined learner experience [64, 177]. Therefore, in this work, SDT guides the design of the Contextual Gamification Strategies (section 6.2), with the aim of satisfying learners’ basic innate needs, and thus to increase learners’ intrinsic motivation.