MOTIVATING THE MASSES - GAMIFIED MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES ON OPENHPI

Gamification is a recently trending concept, which aims on raising the extrinsic motivation of users of a software (e.g. in business applications) by introducing game elements (including rewarding mechanisms) in a non-gaming context. Even though learning is known as a task that needs additional motivation from time to time, the concepts of gamification have not yet gained a foothold in the domain of learning plat- forms in general and massive open online courses in particular. This work gives an overview on suitable gamification building blocks that are applicable to MOOC platforms and explains, how these learning platforms can benefit from game elements in a number of ways. We do not only tackle the users’ motivation but also try to influence students’ behavior in order to soften demand for computing resource at peak usage times. A key question is, if raising students motivation will also have a positive effect on the high dropout rates in most massive open online courses. Besides this, we also focus on raising the importance of discussion forum components, which are crucial parts of most MOOCs and an important source of information for successful learners. Furthermore, we present a case study of our concept at hands of four personae representing different player types with attention to the balance of our rewardings. The concept has been implemented for the MOOC platform openHPI (https://openhpi.de) and will be applied to the future courses.