Gamification Tools to Facilitate Student Learning Engagement in Higher Education: A Burden or Blessing?

Introduction

Novel technologies have paved the way for learners to have a more engaging and immersive learning experience, offering exciting opportunities to collaborate with their instructors and colleagues in new ways. Gamification is a novel technology that has the potential to motivate student learning. Deterding et al. (2011) define gamification as “the use of game-design elements in non-game contexts” (p.9). Though within the past decade, gamification has attracted much attention within various sectors, which has seen successful outcomes such as rapid growth with a number of cases reporting that businesses, educators and web designers have applied gamification as a means to motive and engage learners (Mollick & Rothbard, 2014; Subhash & Cudney, 2018). Despite the achievements of gamification, investigations into when and how gamification can be applied to achieve the most engaging learning experience in higher education settings have been overlooked.

The wider interest in gamification has prompted various studies across various topical areas aimed at certain audiences and disciplines. In 2012, an early literature review (around the time gamification started to take off) by Connolly and Boyle (Connolly et al., 2012) found over 100 empirical studies investigating the impact of gamification in various contexts. By contrast, Nah et al. (2014) conducted a more recent review which investigated gamification in the education context and only found 15 studies that discussed gamification in education settings. In addition, the latter review indicates that gamification has the potential to increase student engagement for improving their learning outcomes which are influenced by a number of situational factors such as the utilisation of tailored feedback (Burgers et al., 2015; Hatala et al., 2014; Lustria et al., 2013). For that reason, the scope of this chapter is to examine whether tailored feedback can reveal whether gamified learning tools can foster student engagement for higher education and whether this is a burden or a blessing for achieving learning outcomes.

In some contexts, players often binge games for prolonged periods of time as opposed to periodically spacing out play over a number of sessions. Several authors argue against the prolonged exposure to gamified tools, suggesting that distributed practice can enhance learning through learning a new skill or developing knowledge by effectively spreading learning across a number of short time intervals (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Heidt et al., 2016; Rohrer, 2015). However, gamification for learning engagement can only succeed when students game for prolonged periods of time in order to process a sufficient amount of new information to achieve their learning outcomes (Welbers et al., 2019). The dilemma here is that prolonged periods of gaming can potentially take away the learning element and becomes a mere leisure activity or a source of entertainment. So main objective of this chapter is to determine whether gamified learning tools for higher education learning is a burden or a blessing.

This chapter hypothesises whether learning engagement from persistent play would a) encourage enforce distributed learning or b) limit enforce distributed learning. Testing this hypothesis calls for the creation of experimental conditions where persistent play would either positively or negatively impact learning participation and engagement.