On Using Gamification to Effectively Influence Student Activity in Online Learning Environments

Abstract

In many online environments, effectively engaging users and motivating them to remain active is a challenging but important problem. Identifying techniques that successfully influence users to spend more time interacting with online platforms is therefore of great interest to system designers. In a domain such as education, where students interact with online learning platforms, encouraging regular participation and motivating students to make high quality contributions may lead to better learning outcomes. Gamification has emerged as a promising technique for boosting engagement in online environments as well as for addressing the motivational challenges present in many educational contexts. In this thesis I evaluate the use of gamification as a way to influence student activity in two related online learning environments. In both environments, students create practice questions that target relevant course concepts and publish them to repositories where they can be answered by peers for study purposes. The question-generation and self-testing activities are common to both tools, however they support different question styles. One tool supports the multiple-choice format, which is familiar to many students and applicable in a wide range of subject areas, and the other supports programming questions where students write source code to solve short algorithmic challenges. I organise the research around two complementary strands. The first strand focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of the specific activities supported by the tools. This involves both correlational studies and randomised controlled experiments that investigate the relationships between question authoring and answering activities and subsequent learning outcomes. I find that students who use the tools to author questions prior to an examination perform significantly better than students who only use the generated questions to study. I also observe a strong positive relationship between the extent to which students answer questions for practice and their subsequent examination performance. These empirical results provide the justification, from an educational perspective, for the second research strand which explores the use of gamification as a way to motivate students to engage further with question-generation and self-testing. I find that some game elements are effective motivators but that these effects are limited to certain activities and to relatively few students. However, no detrimental effects are observed and, for those students most motivated by gamification, their increased activity levels translate to an improvement in examination performance. This thesis serves as a model for evaluating the activities supported by online learning tools alongside the impact of gamification within those tools. It contributes to the current understanding of the effects and limitations of gamification in practice in educational contexts.