Exploring the synergies between gamification and data collection in higher education

In recent years, gamification techniques have been gaining popularity in all kind of educational scenarios, helping students improve their learning process by fostering engagement and attention. Implementing gamification aspects in a course can also provide an opportunity to gather student data that would not have been available otherwise. This paper describes a data gathering process in the context of a university course, as a work-in-progress. Among these data there is information regarding the participation of students in quizzes presented as games in the classroom. These quizzes combined questions covering course con-tents, as well as some regarding self-regulated learning habits. The main advantage observed was a high student participation in the quizzes. As a result, this gamification approach proved to be a more effective way to gather student data compared to other methods applied in previous academic years, which often failed due to many students ignoring optional activities.Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431B 2020/3

Gamification and Learning Analytics to Improve Engagement in University Courses

Gamification is one of the most used techniques to improve active participation and engagement in different kinds of contexts. The use of game techniques is effective in pushing subjects to be involved in an activity. Since the early childhood, indeed, the promises of rewards are useful to affect specific behaviors. On the other hands, the learning analytics have been largely implemented in education in order to improve the assessment and the self-assessment of students, above all in e-learning settings. The research presented in this work aims at combining gamification techniques and learning analytics to improve the engagement in University courses. The paper describes a model of gamification and a learning dashboard defined based on data in Moodle e-learning platform. A pilot test of an app android in which both the solutions have been implemented pointed out promising results