23 Gamified Learning in Higher Education

 

Why Does it Matter?

In studying the gamification of learning, we come to understand what motivates our students to engage in their coursework and what we can do to harness that engagement. We can also see that despite what our learning analytics might tell us about student activity or sign-ins say about student attendance, true engagement runs deeper and involves both high attention and high commitment (Schlecty, 2011).

Gamification in education is not an end in itself, nor is it about “playing games” or competing with others. It’s not about mechanisms like points, badges, and scorecards. In education, gamification is a mindful design process that aims to stimulate motivation and engagement by creating a context that encourages authentic student engagement.

What does it look like in practice?

In this section:

• What is Gamification?
• Motivation
• Engagement
• Game-based Learning
• Simulation-based Learning
• Implementing Gamification in Higher Education
• Gamification in Your Context

What is Gamification?

There is no consensus in the literature as to the one definition to rule them all when it comes to gamification. The most often cited one comes from Deterding et. al. (2011) which describes gamification as an “informal umbrella term for the use of video game elements in non-gaming systems to improve user experiences…”

At its core, gamification is a version of user-centred design that focuses on using the interactions and mechanics of games to harness user motivations in such a way as to stimulate engagement and direct behaviours towards a goal. We’ve all seen it used in various aspects of our lives.

• Fitness tracking watches that help track our progress, compete with or encourage, others and that rewards our achievements with badges, sounds and animations.
• Frequent flyer points that reward our purchases with points, incremental increases in status, free flights and exclusive information and offers.
• Social media sites that allows us to interact with people we like, display the number of user followers/friends and the quality and quantity of engagement with our posts and track what content we like so it can feed it back to us to confirm our opinions and interests

Notice in the examples above there are multiple mechanisms involved. Progress, achievement, socialisation, competition, status, rewards. When it’s done thoroughly, gamification takes into consideration we all have a mix of motivations that can be stimulated in different ways depending on context.

Gamification in education is not an end in itself, nor is it about “playing games” or competing with others. It’s not about mechanisms like points, badges and scorecards. In education, gamification is a mindful design process that aims to stimulate motivation and engagement by creating a context that encourages authentic student engagement.

Motivation

Broadly, there are two major types of motivators – controlled/extrinsic and autonomous/intrinsic. And they are critical to the quality of engagement within any endeavour.

Olin College of Engineering, Intrinsic/Autonomous Motivation with Dr. Edward Deci, Standard Youtube License.

Length: 05:47

Driver	Description of Driver	Duolingo Application
Meaning	There needs to be a meaningful goal that the user would pursue even if the gamification mechanics would be removed.	The underlying goal of the users is to learn languages – the Duolingo platform only gamifies the learning part to make learning more motivating.
Mastery	Gamification should provide challenges, where the users can feel competence, and have the potential to reach the flow state. The users should see their advancement towards the main goal and the feeling of mastery.	The levels in Duolingo gets more difficult incrementally, so the users can feel the competence and mastery while learning. In addition, the users constantly see how close they are from becoming fluent in a language.
Autonomy	The user needs to be in control of their own actions and not feel as if they are being controlled by external factors.	The users can control which categories they want to practice and how much they want to practice.
Relatedness	Users are more intrinsically motivated when they feel connected to others.	Users can add to friends to compete with. They can also share their achievements and join other users in language clubs.

Do Extrinsic Motivations have any use at all?

There are many things people do because of extrinsic motivators. Author and motivation expert Daniel Pink calls these if-then rewards. Here’s what he has to say about them:

“If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards by their very nature narrow our focus and concentrate the mind.”

However, research has shown that external motivators do not work well for tasks that involve cognitive work. In the video below, Pink describes research on the impact of external motivators such as cash. See the summary of research on this in the video below starting at time marker 09:08. This video should start at this point automatically, if it doesn’t, move the play scrub to the correct timestamp. You can watch the video through or stop at 11:37 as he applies this research to business and solving larger economic and business problems.

Dan Pink, The puzzle of motivation, Standard Youtube License.

Length of clip: 02:29

Engagement

In online learning, it’s tempting to look at data analytics to see if students have logged in, how often and how long they stayed in the course. Panopto allows us to see who viewed our videos and whether they watched them. We can see whether people have participated in forums, contributed to Wikis, databases and glossaries.

In face to face classes, we can see who shows up, whether they are involved in the activities and discussions in a tutorial and whether they are facing us with eyes open and sitting upright.

But – a student could be doing all of these things and STILL not be fully engaged.

Schlechty’s (2011) “Indicators of Responses to Work” are meant to get teachers thinking about their content, activities and relationships with their students and why efforts in these realms might be falling short. Although aimed at primary and secondary school settings, consider how easy it could be to misinterpret student participation for engagement when in fact it falls within the realms of compliance.

In Schlecty’s framework, the level of attention combined with the level of commitment combine to produce the quality of the student’s engagement.

 

Players types and motivators: Bartle’s Player Types

In the gaming realm, psychologist, professor, researcher, writer and early game developer Dr Richard Bartle asked players of his mid-1990s multi-user dungeon game what they enjoyed about playing it. He codified their responses based on what they enjoyed within the game itself and how they liked to interact with other players.

Based on their responses, he posited there are four broad categories of game player personality types: Socializers, Explorers, Killers and Achievers. (Interaction Design Foundation) As games advanced, he later expanded his model to 16 types. But his four original player categories will suit our exploration.

As with any personality model, we all have a bit of each of these types in our make-up. That’s why we can like more than one type of game – and why popular games can have so many layers and so much depth to them.

The following YouTube video starting at 0:57 and running to 03:31 does an excellent job of providing an overview of Bartle’s player types. If you decide to complete the Quest activity and take the test yourself, please take the test BEFORE watching the video, then watch it to 05:49 to see how the video creator responds to his results.

James Likes Games, The Gamer Compass- What Type of Gamer Are You?, Standard Youtube License.

Length of the segment to watch: 02:34

Gamification and the Octalysis Framework

This video provides an overview of a framework developed by gamification expert Yu-kai Chou to explore how games use various strategies to stimulate what drives us, the different types of drivers there are and how they map to our motivations. We will be applying this framework to the implementation of gamification higher education courses.

The Octalysis Framework is a detailed, in-depth look at the user-centred design nature of designing the context, mechanics and social interactions of gamified experiences as well as games. The detail of the various gameplay mechanics and interactions for each driver shows how many options there are and how design considerations expand based on the number of drivers and types of motivations one wishes to include.

People can get lost for hours in highly sophisticated, immersive role-playing games like World of Warcraft that tap into combinations of these motivators that provide a range of gameplay options wrapped in an epic narrative set in a lush environment with sound effects, movie scores and voice-overs that rival Hollywood movies. Yet people can also get and stay engaged in simpler games like Sudoku puzzles or Solitaire. Or they can spend hours on social media sites.

As you watch the video, consider how you might use the Octalysis Framework to analyse your favourite games or gamified experiences.

Game-based Learning

By now you should have a solid understanding that gamification – and by extension, gamification of education – involves considering what motivates our students and using elements of games in our educational design to spark that motivation.

Game-based learning is a different approach to using game mechanics in learning. In game-based learning, a game is either created with the purpose of bringing about specific learning outcomes or an existing game is used as a learning exercise.

Where gamified learning is an approach to how you design a course or activity, game-based learning uses self-contained game experiences. While a good deal of the learning can be done in-game, to use game-based learning effectively educators often include a de-brief after the game is played.

Game-based learning can include simulations and roleplay where experiential learning happens for students through real-time feedback and changes that result as a consequence of their actions and interactions.

Game-based learning can be analog or digital, one player against the game or players interacting with the game and each in various ways – as per the Octalysis Framework. The mechanics of game-based learning are as varied as the world of games itself. Game-based learning can involve simple branched scenarios or students could be playing fully produced games.

Immersive Game-Based Learning: Variant Limits

Consider this game-based approach to learning and applying the principles of calculus at the university level. Students could spend hours in this game, with pathways determined by the course facilitator so that the gameplay is aligned with course learning objectives.

Variant: Limits™ Educational Trailer from Triseum on Vimeo.

Scenario-based, Branched Learning Online Games

Here are some examples of online, game-based learning you can explore:

• Canada’s “Food Choices for a Health Planet” aims to educate the public on healthy, budget-conscious eating with a branched learning game with simple mechanics.
• A game designed to teaching online information literacy called Bad News comes with a Teacher’s guide explaining how to use the game in an educational context.
• Lifesaver from the UK’s Resuscitation Council uses branched learning via interactive videos to teach first aid intervention skills and strategies to young adults.

Simulation-based Learning

Simulation-based learning offers the opportunity for learners to practice skills and apply learning in a controlled environment that approximates real-world scenarios. It provides students with opportunities to learn from their mistakes without real-world consequences. They can also allow learners to view the impact of changes to various conditions in a physical, social or economic ecosystem or simulations can provide students with a lived experience of an unfamiliar environment or culture.

In this video from the University of Otago, Christchurch, listen to what the students have to say about their experiences in the Simulation Centre as well as the instructors. Note that the focus is not purely on procedures and technical skills.

University of Otago, University of Otago, Christchurch Simulation Centre, Standard Youtube License.

Length: 02:07

As the video above showed, debriefs after the run of a simulated event provide students with valuable feedback and help educators to identify attitudes and beliefs that may need to be discussed and adjusted before students face real-world situations.

It is not just the medical field that benefits from simulations. Business courses see students developing pitches for clients, playing the stock market with virtual money or creating a business proposal for real-world funding. UniSA’s Social Work and Human Services studio allows students to practice their interviewing and group work skills. The UniSA Adelaide Planetarium has educated adults and children with simulations of the night sky for decades. And UniSA researchers are doing innovative work across a range of applications through the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments.

Like games, simulations range in complexity and production values from responding to scenarios in an online course to interactive simulations where users respond to prompts and experience the results of their actions to the use of augmented or virtual reality to fully realised physical sets where students step into a room or building fitted out with tools, furnishings and interactive elements and are presented with controlled situations in which to perform and then have their performance monitored and analysed.
Unlike games, simulations do not have rules or points. There are no “winners” or teams, no progress bars and – unless it is an asynchronous simulation – no time to hit a pause button or ask for a time out.

Unlike gamification, simulations are not designed to motivate learners via sparking their intrinsic motivations or considering what sorts of mechanics or interactions might appeal to students’ personality types. Simulations are meant to get students hands-on and as close to real-world experiences as resources permit.

Implementing Gamification in Higher Education

In the 2017 paper “Gamification: a systematic review of design frameworks“, researchers analysed gamification frameworks and design processes used to design gamification in various contexts – business, health, education – in order to evaluate their suitability for higher education and identify components of the design process.

The researchers found that in higher education there was a marked lack of the use of a structured, formal design process for implementing gamification – describing many as ‘ad hoc’. This lack of a structured implementation process makes replication of any successful endeavours difficult, with the majority of higher education case studies they encountered reporting poor results.

Here is a big picture overview of the common elements of those projects that did employ a structured framework, arranged in order of a project plan from inception to analysis:

• Project Goals. Determine the objectives of your project. What are the behavioural objectives/goals of the project? Is gamification the answer to the problem you’re trying to solve or improvement you want to make?
• End Users. Most projects used a gamer taxonomy, with Bartle’s being the most popular. How could you research your students’ motivations?
• Storytelling. What is the context of the gameplay/ the narrative involved?
• Game Play.
• Engagement cycle or “gamification loop”. Where a clear goal or challenge is set, conditions for winning are explained, progress is recognised and rewarded, competition interaction is stimulated and success means a change in the player’s status. (Liu et al, 2011)
• Rules of engagement. How are the players expected to engage with the system and other participants?
• Mechanics. What technical or design elements are necessary to support the gamification process?
• Measurement: How will you know if your goals for your gamification project have been achieved?

Identify and define the problem

There is a wealth of literature in the design thinking and user-centred design realms about how to map users and their problems. They boil down to doing research into defining the problem you are trying to solve for whom.

What problem are you solving?

You’re considering gamification of your course or course elements because you either want to solve a problem or improve the learner experience for your students.

As you’ve learnt, gamification’s use relates to motivating participants to achieve goals by providing interactions that will engage them in the behaviours that will lead to the achievement of the goal. So start by being sure that a lack of motivation IS, in fact, at the heart of the problem you want to solve – as the research also shows that improperly applied external motivators to people who are already intrinsically motivated can have poor outcomes.

Put on your researcher hat and start by reviewing how you identified the problem you’re trying to solve. Was it feedback from student evaluations? Lack of participation in forums? Not completing learning tasks or readings? It could be that something else related to your course design is the issue. Access course evaluations, confer with colleagues, review case studies in your discipline and book in a session with a TIU Online Educational Designer.

Borrowing from Kalliojai (2017), answer the following questions about the problem as honestly as you can:

• Is the user problem in achieving their goals related to motivation? Yes, Partly or No
• Is it difficult for the user to find the motivation to complete their goals? Yes, Partly or No
• Can the user goal be divided into meaningful checkpoints? Yes, Partly or No
• Can you propose a solution that will encourage the behaviours that will help students achieve their goals? Yes, Partly or No

If you answered mostly yes – especially yeses to questions 1 and 2 – gamification might help, provided there isn’t a design flaw that may be acting as a barrier. If you answered no, consider that another design issue might need to be solved.

Describe your learners: Who are you solving the problem for?

Large corporations have entire departments devoted to identifying end users and what motivates them. Design thinking projects and large scale gamification implementations spend weeks on qualitative and quantitative research to develop representative user profiles that include backstory and motivators so they can aim their efforts at representative people.

However, you can consider some basic motivators – as you did when considering course design and self-determination theory – and make decisions about simple strategies.

As an academic at UniSA, the tools you have include student evaluations and feedback, discussions with colleagues, and exploring what the literature says in your discipline area. You may also wish to explore the literature on the relationships between personality types and vocational/career choices.

Establish project goals and metrics

Defining measurable goals is at the heart of creating assessible learning objectives and rubrics. This is the bread and butter of education. So what rubric will you create for your gamification project in order to measure its performance against your goals?

As you started with a clearly identified problem that stems from a lack of motivation, you should be able to identify what will change for the user after it’s been solved and how you will be able to identify that the problem has been solved.

The problem you’ve identified is one of a lack of motivation. Your course or activity design isn’t engaging your students’ intrinsic motivators

So, if the goal of gamification of education is to help motivate students to achieve their goals – how will you measure the impact of your project?

Your measures may be a mix of qualifiable and quantifiable metrics and involve a combination of gamification and other design interventions. What’s important is to honestly assess your students’ needs and set up clear measures of your success in using gamification to support those goals.

Narrative

You can choose whether or not your gamification will take on an other-worldly or fantasy sort of narrative- or will be a simulation of real-life scenarios. Or, a series of games such as drills and time trials that don’t involve a narrative.

For instance, your entire marketing or design course could place students in a fictitious agency, where teams compete against others with pitches for clients. Your construction management course could include activities and assessments that involve creating project plans for client scenarios. Or you could create a series of key concept and term learning drills that are mini-games within your economics course.

If you go for a whole of course context/narrative – your discussion forums can become business or client meetings. Assessment outputs become client documents or internal reports. Some learning tasks can be framed as issues that threaten to derail a project unless students resolve them within a certain timeframe while others are logical steps toward the final project work.

You can use visual elements to support your storytelling or narrative in subtle ways or to fully illustrate them and there is a wealth of free resources available to you., both from UniSA and available under open licences from third parties. The UniSA library has curated a range of resources in the Teaching Resources section of the library website.

Strategies

The Octalysis diagram offers suggestions on strategies that can help you implement a gamified approach. Click on the information icons at each driver for a quick overview of the Octalysis drivers in an educational context. For the best experience, expand the graphic full screen. More detailed descriptions and ideas for implementation are included in the separate document, Gamification Octalis elements.

These suggestions are meant to serve as a brainstorming exercise and a jumping-off point for further exploration. And as mentioned earlier, keep in mind that we are not suggesting you have to use ALL of the Octalysis framework drivers to successfully implement gamification.

Gamification in Your Context

Myths About Gamification in Higher Education

Watch from 13:38 to the end to hear Dr Christopher See’s take on the two myths about “game-based learning” in higher education. Or, if you are interested in a project that uses an escape room to gamify health education, watch the video from the beginning.

Christopher See, Gamification in Higher Education, Standard Youtube License.

Length: 02:56

Below is a list of case studies and research related to gamification in higher education. Exploring any of these resources will provide inspiration and help you identify opportunities and potential challenges of implementing gamification for learning. The list is also available as a spreadsheet containing brief summaries for each reference. 

Publish Date	Direct link to publication	Type	Author
10 August 2020	Leveraging An eLearning Gamification Strategy For Your Higher Ed Course [A Guide For L&D]	Web article (html)	Zandstra, G
13 January 2017	Gamification in the Business Communication Course	Journal article (html)	Veltsos, J.R.
21 October 2017	Improved student independence through competitive tinkering	Conference Paper (html)	Martin, R. and Andrew, K.
18 November 2015	Games people play – creating a framework for the gamification of a master’s course in a Portuguese university	Journal article (pdf)	Martins, H.; Freire de Sousa, J.
24 May 2019	Gamification in Software Engineering Education	Conference Paper (html)	Ivanova, G. et. al.
17 July 2012	Gamification in logistics and supply chain education: extending active learning	Report (pdf)	Wood, L.; Reiners, C.
1 January 2015	Gamification in Factory Management Education – A Case Study with Lego Mindstorms	Journal article (html)	Müller, Bastian C, Reise, Carsten & Seliger, Günther
22 January 2019	A Case Study of Deep Gamification in Higher Engineering Education	Journal article (pdf)	Sobke, H.
28 October 2018	Implementing gamification in a university‐level UML modeling course: A case study	Journal article (html)	Jugelaitis, M. et. al.
28 June 2018	Investigating the effects of gamification-enhanced flipped learning on undergraduate students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement	Journal article (pdf)	Biyun Huang, KFW; Chung Kwan Lo
1 April 2020	Gamification of Entrepreneurship Education	Journal article (html)	Isabelle, D.
1 July 2018	Gamification in software engineering education: A systematic mapping	Journal article (html)	Alhammad, M.; Moreno, Ana
1 November 2019	Gamifying CGI: Using Game Design Techniques and Technology to Teach 3D Polygonal Modelling	Thesis (pdf)	Wilson, J.
31 March 2017	Does gamification increase engagement with online programs? A systematic review.	Report (pdf)	Looyestyn, J. et. al.
19 October 2020	Statistics is puzzling: Testing a novel approach to statistics learning	Journal article (pdf)	McIntyre, M.M.
1 March 2021	A scoping review of randomised controlled trials to assess the value of gamification in the higher education of health science students	Journal article (html)	Arruzza, Elio; Minh, Chao
1 October 2018	Gamified learning in higher education: A systematic review of the literature	Journal article (html)	Subhash, Sujit; Cudney, Elizabeth A.
15 August 2019	The Gamification of Learning: A Meta-analysis	Journal article (html)	Sailer, Michael and Homner, Lisa
19 February 2019	Gamification in adult learning: expectations vs reality	Web article (html)	Ebner, Regina
21 November 2020	Gamification in Anatomy Education	Book (html)	See, Christopher

Knowledge Check – What did you learn?

What does it all mean for me?

This Gamification Planner template is based on Design Thinking principles and includes prompts to help you create a plan to gamify your course content and activities.  

Gamification Planner

Keep in mind that planning gamification of an entire course takes a lot of work – as would implementation of the entire Octalysis framework. Consider which elements and strategies will help you address your specific needs.

Researching case studies in addition to learning about the implementation considerations will help you make decisions that will both support effective, mindful learning experiences and balance your workload.

References

Briggs, Saga, 2013. ‘25 Ways to Cultivate Intrinsic Motivation‘, InformED, Accessed 21/5/2021

Chou, Yu-kai, unknown.  ‘The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design‘, Yu-kai Chou: Gamification & Behavioral Design website, Accessed 20 May 2021

Deterding, Sebastian, Sicart, Miguel, Nacke, Lennart, O’Hara, Kenton & Dixon, Dan 2011. ‘Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts’, in CHI ’11 Extended Abstracts on human factors in computing systems, ACM, pp. 2425–2428.

Kallioja, T. (2017). Gamification Kit: A practical toolkit for designing user-centered gamification. Master’s Programme in ICT Innovation. Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.

Kumar, J.M, Herger, M. and Dam, R.F. 2020. Bartle’s Player Types for Gamification, International Design Foundation Website, Accessed 20 May 2021

Liu, Yefeng, Alexandrova, Todorka & Nakajima, Tatsuo 2011, ‘Gamifying intelligent environments’, in Proceedings of the 2011 international ACM workshop on ubiquitous meta user interfaces, ACM, pp. 7–12.

Mekler, Elisa D, Brühlmann, Florian, Tuch, Alexandre N & Opwis, Klaus 2017, ‘Towards understanding the effects of individual gamification elements on intrinsic motivation and performance’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 71, pp. 525–534.

Mora, Alberto, Riera, Daniel, González, Carina & Arnedo-Moreno, Joan 2017, ‘Gamification: a systematic review of design frameworks’, Journal of Computing in Higher Education., vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 516–548.

Rigby, Scott & Ryan, Richard M 2011, Glued to Games, ABC-CLIO, LLC, Westport.

Schlecty, P. , 2011. Indicators of Responses to Work. Extract from: Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work (p. 36).John Wiley and Sons.

Stanford d. school, Get Started with Design Thinking Stanford University (Accessed 20 May 2021)

University of Toronto Libraries, unknown. What is Game Based Learning. University of Toronto. Accessed 22 May 2021.