Abstract:

In an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, a national state of disaster was declared resulting in South Africa going into lockdown on 26 March 2020. Overnight, the higher education sector in South Africa transitioned from face-to-face (F2F) teaching and learning to emergency remote teaching and learning as an alternative. South Africa remained in a national state of disaster for 750 days, albeit at various levels of restricted movement. As such, most universities continued with online teaching until the end of the 2021 academic year.
The University of Zululand, a previously disadvantaged rural university, is a residential university, meaning that teaching and learning takes place F2F. With the transition to online teaching and learning as a result of lockdown, one of the concerns was how to ensure that students remain engaged with their study material. Various incentives are known to promote increased academic performance, including money, games, honour rolls, leader board activities and badges. While incentives appear to have potential to promote student performance, student engagement remains a problem. This is so in a F2F environment and even more so in an online environment.
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the relationship between issuing of badges (as incentives) on student's performance in Commercial Law A and B at the University of Zululand.
With the aim of keeping students engaged online, the lecturer issued badges as an incentive for accessing prescribed learning material online and for activity participation. Badges were issued in Commercial Law A (semester 1) and Commercial Law B (semester 2) over three years (2020, 2021 and 2022) for three different cohorts (CHT). A total of 2004 students divided into three cohorts (CHT-1 801, CHT-2 642 and CHT-3 561 in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively) were used in this study. The badges that were issued provided neither proof of nor served as an endorsement that a student had mastered a particular skill.
The study showed that students with higher percentages of badges performed better (P<0.05) that those with lower over the three years. It was also noticed that CHT-1 were more motivated by badges more than CHT-2 and CHT-3 because the number of badges for higher performances decreased (P<0.05) over time. However, not all lower badges were associated with poor performance hence the presence of intrinsic factors that requires more investigation.

Keywords:

Badges, higher education, incentives, LMS, online teaching and learning.