=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1841/E05_113
|storemode=property
|title=Gamifying Collaborative Activities in MOOCs
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1841/E05_113.pdf
|volume=Vol-1841
|authors=Alejandro Ortega-Arranz,Juan A. Muñoz-Cristóbal,Alejandra Martínez-Monés,Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo,Juan I. Asensio-Pérez
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/emoocs/Ortega-ArranzMM17
}}
==Gamifying Collaborative Activities in MOOCs==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1841/E05_113.pdf
Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
Gamifying Collaborative Activities in MOOCs
Alejandro Ortega-Arranz, Juan A. Muñoz-Cristóbal, Alejandra Martínez-Monés,
Miguel L. Bote-Lorenzo, Juan I. Asensio-Pérez
GSIC-EMIC Research Group, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
{alex|juanmunoz}@gsic.uva.es, amartine@infor.uva.es
Abstract. MOOCs can bring together thousands of students with different
background in the same course. This fact presents a good opportunity for
instructors to design and enact collaborative activities that may involve groups.
However, MOOCs present some drawbacks that can hinder the completion of
this kind of activities such as the high drop-out rates, the self-paced character or
the resistance of the students to abandon their comfort zone. The use of
gamification in MOOC contexts has shown potential benefits to enhance
students' engagement, encourage students to interact with others and promote
activity submission, which can be useful for increasing the completion of such
collaborative activities. This paper shows the gamification design, and the first
outcomes, of a MOOC that involves gamified and collaborative activities. To
carry this out, the course was configured with 15 badges that students can
achieve when performing social and optional actions for completing the course.
Keywords: Gamification, MOOC, Collaboration, Group, Badges
1 Introduction
The inclusion of collaborative activities in MOOCs can support the construction of
joint knowledge, foster effective social interactions and enrich learning with social
and cognitive dimensions [1]. In fact, the usage of collaborative activities was one of
the purposes of the first MOOCs, which followed a connectivist pedagogical
approach. The aim of the so-called cMOOCs was to promote students learning by the
interactions with other students of the course and by the creation of joint artifacts [2].
Currently, many MOOCs can reach up to several thousands of students interested in
the same topic. MOOCs can bring together people with same and different
background, course expectations, working time, etc. This kind of courses presents a
good opportunity to make students learn together by working and sharing their
knowledge [3].
Some collaborative activities are frequently used in MOOCs, such as peer reviews,
and activities using forums or wikis. However, in many cases, the students’
interactions produced in these activities are limited. Therefore, it is also interesting to
consider other collaborative learning designs that may involve more opportunities for
students to interact such as activities involving small groups or collaborative learning
scripts [4]. Although there are several MOOC platforms that allow group formation
and complex collaborative capabilities (e.g., Canvas Network, open edX, NovoEd),
these activities are still uncommon in MOOCs [1][5]. This absence of collaborative
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
activities can be caused by different reasons inherent to MOOCs, such as low students’
engagement, high drop-out rates, the self-paced character or the resistance of the
students to abandon their comfort zone [3]. Precisely, a strategy that has shown it can
enhance the students’ social engagement and reduce the high drop-out rates is
gamification [6].
Gamification is defined as the inclusion of elements and structures that frequently
appear in games (e.g., narrative, badges, missions) in non-game contexts [7].
However, although there has been research exploring the use of gamification in
collaborative activities in MOOCs [8] [9] [10], such research has been mainly focused
on forums and peer-reviews, not exploring other more complex collaborative
activities, such as those involving small-scale groups generating shared learning
artifacts. In this sense, Ramírez-Donoso et al. (2015) developed a gamified mobile
application external to the MOOC platform to gamify question-based group activities
[11].
Therefore, the underlying research question of this work is How can gamification
be included in collaborative learning activities in MOOC platforms without
restricting to forum activities and peer-reviews? To explore this issue, we have
gamified a 7-week MOOC that involves different collaborative activities (including
two small-group activities). This paper presents the gamification design, and some
initial results about the usage of gamification in that course (at the moment of writing
this paper the MOOC enactment is still in progress).
The next section describes the context of the gamified and collaborative MOOC,
the followed research approach, the gamification design, and the first gamification
data of the experience. Finally, Section 3 summarizes some initial conclusions of this
work.
2 Gamifying a Collaborative MOOC on Translation
The topic of the MOOC is an introduction to financial translation from English to
Spanish. The MOOC is implemented in Canvas Network1. Apart from the recorded
videos, readings and individual activities (e.g., questionnaires), the course design
included several collaborative activities: (i) general forums to introduce students,
share contents and discuss doubts, (ii) peer review activities, (iii) collaborative
glossaries, and (iv) small-group activities in which the students have to
collaboratively extract terms from different texts2
2.1 Methodology
Since the instructors of the MOOC had no previous experience with gamification in
educational contexts, we used a co-design approach, forming a design group
composed of instructors and researchers. We used different data gathering techniques
to explore the research question posed (see Section 1).
1
Canvas Network: https://www.canvas.net/, last access: March, 2017.
2
For further information about the course design and implementation see Ortega-Arranz et al., 2017 [12].
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
(i) Questionnaires: (i.a) previous to the gamification design of the course to know
the instructors’ background about MOOCs, collaboration and gamification, the
original course design, the activities and the contents; (i.b) at the beginning of
the course to collect the background students data of the students that were
enrolled in the course to analyze if there is any relationship between the
students’ profiles and the badges earned; and (i.c) at the end of the course to
deepen in the students’ reasons for earning badges.
(ii) Collection of Canvas Network and Badgr database entries: (ii.a) from the
Canvas Network logs, we plan to retrieve information regarding the number of
active students3; the number of submissions per student; the number and url of
the pages visited per student; the number of students that performed the
rewarded collaborative actions; and their interactions. (ii.b) From the Badgr
log, we plan to obtain information regarding the times that each badge is
issued; and the id of the students that earned the badges.
2.2 Gamification Design
Badgr was used as a gamification platform for issuing badges as a reward of optional
student’s actions aiming to promote the students’ interaction and activity submission.
In addition, a badge leaderboard was enabled to let students share the number and
type of badges they already earned. The Badgr platform can be easily integrated into
Canvas through IMS LTI4, allowing instructors to choose the students’ actions that
are gamified. Fig. 1 shows the fifteen badges that we included in the MOOC and
describes the actions that students have to perform to be rewarded.
As shown in Fig. 1, several badges are issued for conducting the same actions in
different activities. For example, badges Rookie Reviewer!, Intermediate Reviewer!,
Advanced Reviewer! and Expert Reviewer! are issued for completing peer reviews in
different activities. Therefore, the co-design team decided to make this structure clear
for the students and creating suite of badges with a similar visual representation, also
simulating the gold, silver, bronze approach typical in games [8][13].
The co-design team included ten badges related to collaborative activities. The
remaining five badges were also included in the course trying to keep engaged the
students during the weeks with only individual activities. Also, the team preferred to
configure a range of badges instead of a single one for completing the course, thus
allowing the students more possibilities for competing in the leaderboard. It is
important to highlight that the students performing the issued actions but not claiming
the badge, are not rewarded5. This way, we can analyze whether the students are
interested in the gamification.
3
Considering that each weekly module has a compulsory task for getting the course completion
certificate, we have considered as active students those who completed the compulsory activity of the
previous week. For the first week, we have considered those students that at least visited one page of the
course.
4
IMS Learning Tools Interoperability: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interoperability,
last access: March, 2017.
5
In order to claim the badge, the students have to complete the required task and visit the gamification
tab added in the course interface.
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
Canvas Network has some limitations to automatically gamify some of the course
collaborative activities. This would introduce burden for teachers and delay in the
assignment of badges, which would hinder the benefits of gamification. Due to this
reason, the co-design team decided to implement indirect methods to reward some
badges, following a similar approach to the work presented by Dominguez et al. [13].
In our case, in order to assign automatically badges in some collaborative activities,
we forced the students to write and submit, in a Canvas text field, a proof of the work
they had carried out (e.g., the terms introduced in the collaborative glossary with
Google Forms).
Fig. 1. Badges configured for the MOOC.
2.3 Gamification Enactment
The total number of enrolled students in the course is 1018 (932 visited at least one
page of the course). At the moment of writing this paper, the course is currently in the
fourth week and the students have only been able to earn the badges related to these
first weeks (see Fig. 1). As a consequence, in this paper we provide some initial
insights of the gamification usage in the first weeks of the MOOC (excluding the two
small-group activities). Table 1 summarizes the first students’ data (i.e., the number
of active students, the number of students that completed the tasks to get the badges,
and the number of students that finally claimed the badges).
The gamification is being used by the active students (373 students have claimed at
least one badge, i.e., 40.02% of students that at least visited one page of the course)
although that usage seems to decrease during the time: around 90% of students
claimed the first week badges, and around 75% claimed the badges during the second
one. However, this is a preliminary result and we will have to wait for the end of the
course to see how gamification evolves during the remaining weeks.
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
Open Badge Active Students who Rewarded %Badges
Week Students did the task Students Claimed
1 Welcome 932 285 269 94.39
1 Quiz0 (90%) 932 245 224 91.43
2 Glossary 479 130 100 76.92
2 Quiz1 (90%) 479 241 179 74.27
3 Searcher* 274 93 62 66.67
4 Translator* 167 22 12 54.54
4 Good Colleague* 167 2groups 1 8.33
Table 1. Statistics of the course badges. *Badges associated to activities that are still open.
3 Conclusions and Future Work
The gamification of collaborative activities beyond activities performed in forums or
peer reviews in MOOCs can potentially encourage students to interact with other
course students. The gamification design for these collaborative activities is still
challenging for promoting the instructors’ expected gamification outcomes. To this
end, the co-design team full exploited the gamification capabilities of Canvas
Network and Badgr for different types of collaborative activities in the described
MOOC. However, such capabilities are limited. Aiming to automatically reward
students, the gamification was implemented through indirect means. As a future work,
we aim to further explore how different types of collaborative activities in MOOCs
could be automatically gamified.
In this course we have decided to implement badges and a leaderboard.
Nevertheless, it would be also interesting to analyze the outcomes of collaborative
gamification with different game design elements such as points or duels, and in
different activities. We also plan to further analyze after the completion of the MOOC
enactment, quantitative and qualitative data (e.g., Canvas Network logs can show if
students claimed the badges after performing the rewarded actions, showing the
interest of the students for earning them; and the questionnaires could help to
understand why students wanted to earn the different badges and if such badges or the
leaderboard encouraged them to keep on working in the collaborative activities) for
exploring in depth the benefits of gamifying collaborative activities.
Acknowledgements
This research has been partially supported by the Junta de Castilla y León
(VA082U16) and Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (TIN2014-53199-C3-2-
R). The authors thank the rest of the GSIC/EMIC and Canvas team for their valuable
ideas and support.
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Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017:
Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track
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