Evaluation of awarding badges on Student’s engagement in Gamified e-learning systems

Abstract

Gamification has been gaining increasing acceptability in recent times in educational and commercially related activities, as a tool that encourages and improves the motivation of digital native learners. Since learners can easily engage, educationists have explored gamification as a tool for remediation of engagement, motivation, and collaboration. However, the literature showed that the structural and contextual deployment of game elements is defined only partially in practice. Subsequently, gamification success and failure factors should be explored to identify the required enhancement to achieve improved efficiency in current systems. This research extracts the relevant aspects of gamification that need due consideration to make a guided choice through existing theories. This study is based on an online gamified study that uses well-founded concepts in teaching and evaluation of students in a university. Although badges earned and time spent indicated an increase in engagement, the results show that further work needs to be done by incorporating feedback elements, social interaction, and interactive guidance. The underlying impression is that timely, frequent feedback and personalized guidance, avenues for collaboration and interactivity need to be explored towards the better utility of gamification. Therefore, learning culture in the current learner-centered environment should be further studied to infuse better productivity.