Birkbeck Knowledge Lab seminar: Gamifying online learning in Moodle
When:
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Venue:
Online
Student engagement is considered as a key contributing factor for effective online learning- a factor directly related to students’ academic performance. Lately, gamification strategies have been explored as a way to enhance students’ motivation to use learning environments and address issues of low engagement. In this talk, the design principles of a gamification framework for promoting students’ cognitive engagement and cultivating a sense of Community of Inquiry throughout an online course are presented. Also, the consequences for online course design in Moodle are discussed. A focus of this work is the use of gamification, and particularly the social award approach, as a way of empowering learner communities. With the aim to promote collaborative work & individual involvement, various types of individual & social rewards are provided, reflecting the quality of students’ discourse input and the level of interaction among the members of the community, based on Social Network Analysis-SNA. We also explore how SNA metrics can be used to automate the rewarding process by assessing the development of a community. Such a mechanism can enhance the design of adaptive and intelligent systems enabling the development of online learning communities. Moodle affordances and limitations for delivering gamification enhanced courses will be also discussed.
Contact name:
George Magoulas
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Kyparissia Papanikolaou
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Kyparissia Papanikolaou is Professor of e-learning at the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education, Athens, Greece, and Director of the Advanced Technologies for e-Learning Design Lab. Her research interests involve learning design, adaptive & intelligent learning environments, technology enhanced learning, teacher education and ICT. She has participated in the development of open educational resources for engineering education and web-based educational systems, like PeerLAND (Peer Assessment of LeArNing Designs) and INSPIREus (INtelligent System for Personalised Instruction in a Remote Environment for us). Since 2014, she co-organises the track “Adaptive and Personalized Technology-Enhanced Learning (APTeL)” at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT).