Autonomous gamified learning: a pilot

Students in the Academic Writing Course often have diverse linguistic needs and challenging schedules. The autonomous gamification of the course was meant to open up multiple learning paths so that students can find the most fitting content, environment, and schedule for their individual learning situation. Students who need a firmer foundation in grammar, vocabulary, or sentence structure can focus on these areas first while more proficient students, including native speakers, can opt to learn only about the macrostructure of theses. Similarly, students who prefer to work in groups can do task-based learning in class while those who like working individually will be able to do quizzes, assignments, and individual study. The learning schedule also depends on the student: if they have a job, internship, semester abroad, or other academic engagement, they are able to engage with materials at their own pace. All these changes provide greater autonomy to students, which also entails that they need to assume responsibility for their own learning.

The project had two parts: the creation of an online environment and the redesign of in-class materials. On Moodle, the Level-Up! plug-in enabled us to track course participants’ work and award points for the completion of each task. Students can thus earn points by interacting with the online materials, level up, follow a storyline, move up (or down) a leaderboard, collect badges, and interact with others and the lecturer. The point system is also carried over to in-class activities: when students complete a project in class, they receive points for it. The in-class projects (e.g., creating a literature review, peer reviewing an introduction, editing an abstract, etc.) are always based on flipped classroom materials: students acquire some knowledge about a topic online and then put this knowledge in practice in class. The online and in-class learning thus complement each other and provide an opportunity for all students to find a meaningful and engaging way to improve their academic writing skills.

The goals of the project have been fully achieved: the course is now running in a gamified format, which is received well by most, according to the feedback gathered. However, there were unexpected developments during the trial run of the project. Firstly, we slightly underestimated the students’ desire to find an easy way out of the course by clicking away meaninglessly on Moodle. Therefore, additional safeguards (e.g., a limit on the number of attempts in quizzes, points only awarded for successfully completed actions) have been implemented to minimize the number of these attempts. Secondly, some gamification tools were not as effective as previously anticipated. Students did not find the storyline motivating, so it has been revised, but this did not affect the assessment.
Despite these initial hurdles, the final evaluation of the new course design was firmly positive. Students enjoyed the autonomy the most, but some gamification elements were also engaging. The most motivating gamification elements include the progress bar, the point-based system, the immediate feedback (e.g., quizzes), levelling up, and the divergent pathways. The effects of the following elements were more mixed: interaction, gradual unveiling of materials, graphics, leaderboard, and badges. This shows that the tools commonly associated with gamification (e.g., badges, leaderboard) are not as effective as structural changes (point-based system, divergent pathways, etc.). When asked whether students were happy they have taken a gamified rather than a regular course, the answers were affirmative (5.11 on a scale of 1 to 7). The detailed analysis of the student responses to our survey will be presented in a publication about the redesign of the course.
On the basis of the experience gathered during the gamification of this course, we set up a professional exchange page on Moodle in collaboration with LET, to help other lecturers use the Level Up! plug-in. Since the gamified system is easily transferable to other teaching contexts, we hope others will experiment with the capabilities of this tool. Regarding the scale-up of the system, it would be possible to create a self-paced general writing aid for thesis writing or scientific publications.