MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES - PROMOTING ENGAGEMENT THROUGH MEANS OF GAMIFICATION

In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been sought as one of the means to bridge the knowledge gap in world we live. Within MOOCs, the barriers of time, space, location, and accessibility have been overcome compared to traditional means of learning.

The creation of collaborative, learner-centric and purposeful learning experience have been approached. MOOCs have taken the education community by storm with their unprecedented high student enrollment numbers. The adoption of well-reputed and well-known academic institutes like Stanford, MIT, and others persuaded many academic institutes worldwide to jump into this trend.

When looked at the MOOCs success, completion rates can be seen as the key success metric to this new pedagogical medium. Nevertheless, many academic studies have shown that completion rates are a misleading indicator of the success of an MOOC, due to that learners have different aims and motivations. Some learners come with the aim to update professional knowledge to match market needs, some come with the aim to socialize with like-minded people while others simply enjoy the pleasure of learning and expanding their horizon about topics they did not know before.

Going beyond completion rates to get clear understanding of the obstacles, problems and issues facing students while learning within MOOCs is needed. In general, enhancing customer engagement helps to elevate services to be more satisfactory and fulfilling, and increase the customer value of services.

An empirical and exploratory study based on service science was performed on the first and biggest Arabic MOOC platform named RWAQ. The aim of the study was to understand the customer value of the service and promote student engagement in the online learning environment represented by MOOCs to help answer the following questions: How to understand student engagement in MOOCs? How to promote student engagement within MOOCs using gamification? The study was based on service innovation and design and gamification methods.

The study realized as a part of the Master Program in Service Innovation and Design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, enabled to gain a fresh look at the learners’ aims, motivations, and needs and resulted in proposing solutions to enhance student engagement.