Gamification: an innovative pedagogy to onboard students for online learning success

The unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have caused a paradigm shift in the education sector by transitioning from the traditional face to face learning to online learning. Attitudinal studies exploring the attitudes and characteristics of the students in online learning have revealed a lack of student engagement and motivation in the online education delivery. Gamification is the principle of adding game-like elements to non-game activities and in the online learning context, it is a strategy used to enhance engagement and motivation. The recent literature suggests that if gamification is well planned and integrated in the course design, it has the potential to improve learning. However, there still lacks qualitative research to show how the different game elements can fit into different learning contexts. To address this gap, this study shows how gamification was brought into the lesson design and how different game elements were woven into a learning experience. This study adds up to the existing literature by going beyond implementing the most commonly used game elements namely point, badge and leader board. The outcome of the user experiences showed that the “glearners” were motivated and propelled through the learning content in a fun and enjoyable way.


Introduction
According to recent studies by Mishra et al. (2020) and Bojovic et al. (2020), the unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 crisis has led to a rapid transition from the physical classrooms to online learning.Online learning is defined as "learning experiences in synchronous or asynchronous environments using different devices (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, etc.) with internet access.In these environments, students can be anywhere (independent) to learn and interact with instructors and other students" (Singh & Thurman, 2019).Prensky (2001) originally demarcated the digital natives as "the generation who have grown up immersed in technology."Though to believe that the digital natives will feel better in online learning, however, there are various challenges that arise which are "a sense of isolation, the struggle with staying motivated, lack of face-toface interaction, difficulty in getting immediate feedback, the need for constant and reliable access to technology."(De Paepe, Zhu, & Depryck, 2018;Lei & Gupta, 2010;Venter, 2003;Zuhairi, Wahyono, & Suratinah, 2006).
An attitudinal study conducted on Jordanian university students through a quantitative survey method showed that student's attitudes towards online learning is generally negative (Mahfouz and Salam, 2021).Furthermore, according to Prensky (2001), the digital natives favour engagement in games and learn through digital plays and interactions.According to recent research, gamification has the potential to increase students' motivation and engagement in learning environments (Rapp et al., 2019;Zou 2020;Bai et al., 2020).
However, there are a dearth of qualitative studies exploring the experience and perception of students in a gamified online learning environment.Moreover, a number of studies consider gamification as a one size fit all concept, yet gamification requires a well thought design of the game design elements for the outcome to be successful.Therefore, the application of the different game design elements within a specific context should be explored (Sailer, Hense, Mayr, & Mandl, 2017).This research adds up to the literature by exploring the user experiences to know how by embedding different game elements throughout the design of an online course can lead to an enhanced learning experience.
The following research question led this study: How are the selected game elements influencing the student's experience in an online gamified course?

Game elements
Gamification can be defined as "the use of game-design elements in non-game contexts" (Deterding et al., 2011) or "using game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems" (Kapp, 2012: 10).When gamification is applied correctly, it can provide the drive for students to become intrinsically motivated and hence engaged in their learning.Werbach and Hunter (2012) illustrated the different game design elements through a pyramid model constituting of dynamics, mechanics and components.An example to explain the concept is a student completes a challenge (mechanic) that results in gaining points (component) and hence progresses in the learning (dynamic).Figure 1 demonstrates the three levels and how the game elements were mapped into the lesson design of an online course.

Gamifying the lesson design of an online course
The D6 gamification design framework proposed by Werbach and Hunter (2012) was applied in gamifying the online course.The gamification design framework consists of six important steps in chronological order.The following section elaborates on each step.
Step 1 Step 2 The points, badges and leader boards triad were woven in the course design in addition to a continuous storyline that was created through a narrative inspired by the popular series "La Casa de Papel" (Money Heist).The purpose of the adventure-focused narrative was to hook the attention of students in the online course, which will lead to build interest in the course content and whereby students become intrinsically motivated to continue to learn.The main character is The Professor who is the instructor of the course.A customised avatar was designed and it also reflects the Mauritian context represented by the famous Dodo bird as shown in Figure 2. The workbooks were shared progressively to the students and they had to complete it before the next online synchronous session.A snapshot of a workbook is shown in Figure 3.

Define Business Objectives
A refined course learning outcomes were devised to adapt to the needs of the online learning context.

Delineate target behaviour
List down the activities through the creation of workbooks.Specify the point system, team work activities and quests/challenges that need to be completed.The students were made aware of the timeline of activities in an adventurous manner with jargons from the narrative as displayed in Figure 4.  Step 3 The achiever likes to receive badges, points and status.The explorer likes to discover new things by unlocking a level or milestone.The socialiser likes to interact with other players through team work.The killer likes to win and is competitive.The activities were designed to cater for all four types of players as elaborated in Figure 6.Students were assigned a group named after a city as per the characters in the series "La Casa de Papel" (Money Heist).There were ten groups of students assigned to the following cities: Berlin, Denver, Helsinki, Lisbon, Moscow, Nairobi, Oslo, Rio, Stockholm and Tokyo.
Step 4 Fogg's Behaviour Model ( 2009) was applied for triggering the students to complete the activities.According to this model, there must be three fundamental elements namely motivation, ability and trigger for a desired behaviour change to happen.The Professor sent reminder emails and adventurous missions to students as a trigger to complete the tasks.An example of a mission that creates curiosity is illustrated in Figure 7.The Professor created an emotionally engaging learning experience for the students by giving an assignment to the learners through a secret video message whereby the students need to look for an assignment on Moodle and complete the assignment.

Figure 7: Example of a mission challenge
After completion of a level, the participants received a badge as feedback and reward.The badges were customised and an example is displayed in Figure 8.There were five levels to complete to gain five different badges.

Engagement loop:
Actions that are performed and how the system reacts to it.
Progression loop: Move forward the experience by increasing the complexity of the challenge.Step 5 The Four keys inlock emotions as follows:  Hard Fun creates emotion of fiero (challenge) and epic win while pursuing a goal.The leader boards and badges produced a win-state feeling. Easy Fun focusses on the pure enjoyment of exploring the game activities. Altered States are described as enjoying changes in their internal state during and after play. In People factor, the player pursuits for social bonding and personal recognition that comes from team work.
Figure 11 illustrates how the four fun elements were incorporated in the lesson activities.

Don't forget the fun
Add fun element by applying Lazarro's (2004) Four Keys model: hard fun, easy fun, altered states, and people.Step 6 Moodle was the learning management platform used at the Open University of Mauritius and Zoom videoconferencing was the platform used to conduct live sessions.

Research Design
A quantitative survey was carried out at the beginning of the semester to obtain baseline information about the students in terms of their game-playing habits.The online gamified course was run from August 2021 to December 2021.In order to evaluate the game elements designed in the online course, at the end of the semester a qualitative method was used through semi-structured interviews with the participants.

Participant and Sampling
The programme B.Ed (Hons) Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) was selected based on an earlier research conducted where the programme was among the top 4 respondents to provide their attitudes and characteristics in online learning at the Open University of Mauritius.The course "Music and Movement" from this programme was chosen through convenient sampling since the instructor was willing to cooperate in this research.Out of the 46 students who completed the online gamified course, 15 students volunteered to participate in the semi-structured interviews which were recorded and later transcribed.Finally, based on the thematic analysis, several themes emerged.

Pre-course survey results
The participants were asked a few questions to obtain information on their game playing habits before gamifying the online course.They indicated their frequency of playing online games on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from Never to Very Frequently as depicted in Figure 14.It is noticed that the majority of the students played online games.The respondents were asked to rate the importance of playing games in terms of rewards, fun, challenge and team on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from Not at all Important to Extremely Important as depicted in Figure 15.It can be noticed that the majority of the students want the fun factor when playing games.In order to determine the player type, the students were asked to identify themselves as per Bartle (1996) player type: Killer, Achiever, Explorer and Socialiser.As depicted in Figure 16, the class were divided more or less equally in terms of the four player types.

Qualitative results
From the analysis of the qualitative data, the participants highlighted aspects of their experience in a gamified online learning course.There were many themes that emerged from the interview data.For the purpose of the paper, the four game elements Points, Badges, Leader boards and Narrative are further analysed and discussed in Table 1.
Table 1.Classification of the themes with the user experiences

Game Elements Experience/Feelings towards Gamification Points
 Fun/Attractive The point system created a fun and rewarding environment by associating playful activities to experience points.Two participant's comments on the point system are mentioned in the following statements: "It is a fun way to get experience points when I completed an activity instead of focusing only on exam and assignment.""I like the experience points system as it is much more attractive compared to the traditional point system."

Badges
 Excitement The badges raised interest to know what next as task has to be completed.One participant eagerly responded through the comment: "I was so motivated to complete the tasks to have my badges.I can say when I completed my tasks I was like an excited kid which was impatient to receive her reward."

 Responsive/Stimulus
The badges acted as a stimulus as the students wanted to work harder to learn further to get more badges.One comment extracted from the interview illustrated this: "It was encouraging to have the badges.It makes me want to respond more to it.It makes a difference as this little change put on encouragement to progress."

Leader boards
 Competitive Some of the students agreed on the competitive nature of the leader board through the following statement: "The leader board is like a competition.You want to know where you are in the competition."  Collaborative/Social bonding However, the leader board also acted as a collaborative tool for non-competitive students where they found it as a platform to look for help with other classmates.One comment extracted through the following statement: "I am not too competitive.Still, I use the leader board to search for help with my classmates."

Narrative
 Immersive The immersive emotional experience that the narrative generated in this gamified module hooked the students in the course till its completion.A participant's comment on the narrative element is mentioned in the following statement: "It was very interesting the narrative story.The Professor who guides us in another world, which is very interesting.It makes the activities that need to be completed like a game where we enter in another gaming world." Curiosity Shifting the goal of the student from getting a good grade to a curiosity of what happens at the end of the narrative have led to further engagement throughout the course.One comment extracted from the interview illustrated this: "The city name throughout the course was also very interesting and friendly.I have enjoyed the breakout rooms in the Zoom application where we enter another level of the game and we need to solve something..."

Lesson Learnt
From this study, it is found that the following factors are recommended for a gamified online learning course to be successful: a) The narrative creates a gamified pathway by driving the student through a scaffolded learning experience.The narrative can come from popular stories in books or movies as it has to emotionally connect with the students.
b) Customised badges inspired from the narrative is an interesting way for rewarding the students.The contextualization of the study can be taken into consideration when designing the badges.For this specific context, the Dodo bird was very much culturally relevant to the Mauritian students.c) Making use of experience points instead of the normal grading points has attracted the students in accumulating them.This can be an innovative way of grading students instead of the traditional marking systems.
d) The leader board for a competitive student serves as a motivational booster while for a non-competitive student, it serves as social bonding to connect with the class mates to reach out for help.

Limitations and Future work
The scope of the study was to focus on how the gaming elements proposed by Werbach and Hunter (2012) embedded in a specific online course at the Open University of Mauritius influence the learning experience of the students.As the experience of the participants are limited to the specific context of study, future work can be done in other contexts to explore its relevance.Further studies with iterations may also be repeated.

Conclusion
The aim of the study was to explore how game elements embedded in a gamified online course influence the student's experience in the learning.The outcome of the user experiences has shown that the way the game elements have been woven in the lesson design has improved learning.The Points, Badges and Leader boards together with a Narrative feature have shown to intrinsically motivate students to continue to learn by sustaining engagement through the course.Gamification has triggered emotions like fun, excitement, curiosity and immersion which have led to a scaffolded personalised learning experience for each student.Therefore, it can be concluded that applying gamification strategies in online learning has proven to be successful in this context of study.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Game elements mapped in the course design

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Snapshot of a workbook

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Snapshot of the timeline of the activities

Figure 5 :
Figure 5: Snapshot of a group activity

Figure 6 :
Figure 6: Activities created as per player types

Figure 9 :
Figure 9: Snapshot of the leader board

Figure 10 :
Figure 10: Snapshot of the break the ice post

Figure 11 :
Figure 11: Adding fun to the activities

Figure 12 :Figure 13 :
Figure 12: A reminder email sent by The Professor

Figure 14 :
Figure 14: How often do you play?

Figure 15 :
Figure 15: When playing games, rate the following in terms of importance.

Figure 16 :
Figure 16: Type of player