DESIGN: Assignment #1

Many theories have been proposed to explain what motivates student behavior during learning, but
with the digitalization of this process in recent years, the question shifts towards learning in the digital
space. The following review of literature confirms that there is a problem with the lack of motivation in
e-learning environments, discusses a specific gamification solutions and concludes that gamification, and
especially the usage of progress bars and badges is a good way to motivate the students, participating in
e-learning.

E-learning environments capable of keeping learner’s curiosity and focused on building strong teacher-
student relationships are the most effective in terms of offering a good learning experience. But this is
not an easy task, as Mozelius, Peter & Collin, Jonas & Olsson, Marie (2015) suggest, because courses in a
virtual environment can leave recently enrolled participants in a state of loneliness, confusion, and
boredom. Learning of new content or skills, for which a schema in long term memory is lacking, can
cause the learner’s limited working memory to overload. This overload can result in unconfident and
even anxious learners, which can lead to a failing learning process and course drop‐out (Mozelius et al.,
2015). The two techniques to increase learner control and motivation proposed in their study are
visualization and gamification.

The impact of visualization and gamification on the performance of students in an e-learning

environment has been well researched. Although it is only a small part of the ways to capture one’s
attention, a number of studies demonstrate a correlation between student’s motivation and progress,
and the visualization of that progress with a bar or a badge or both. For example, Andika Y. Utomo and
Harry B. Santoso. (2015) found that because those elements are more explicit among others, the
extrinsic motivation of the participants in an e-learning platform will increase. Moreover, the progress
bar will not only increase the motivation of the students but will indicate the percentage of their
progress and let them know how far they are from completing their task. According to this research, the
students felt challenged to make all the progress bars fulfilled, so that there is no empty space in the
bar, thus completing their tasks. They were curious about the badges that they would get once they
performed the suggested action, which invoked their curiosity and made the learning process more fun.
(Andika Y et al., 2015) These findings are also supported by the course evaluation questionnaires,
discussions, and comments conducted by Mozelius et al. (2015) during a course on game‐based
learning.

In a world where digital transformation is happening at a rapid pace, the e-learning platforms will only
continue to increase in number and size, especially in times of pandemic. Researching how to make the
e-learning experience better and to motivate the students more is essential for the success of these
digital platforms. Guided from that need, the literature reviewed in this document defines the overall
issue and offers some solutions. The insights gained from this study will serve us well in our service
design project focused on the e-learning platform for candidate-students.

References:
Mozelius, Peter & Collin, Jonas & Olsson, Marie. (2015). Visualisation and gamification of e-Learning - Attitudes
among course participants. Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Learning, ICEL. 2015.

Andika Y. Utomo and Harry B. Santoso. (2015). Development of gamification-enriched pedagogical agent for e-
Learning system based on community of inquiry. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9