Authors:
Malte Neugebauer
;
Basile Tousside
and
Jörg Frochte
Affiliation:
Bochum University of Applied Sciences, 42579 Heiligenhaus, Germany
Keyword(s):
E-Learning, Higher Education, Mathematics, Gamification, Learning Management System
Abstract:
How university students succeed in math courses at the beginning of their studies is of great relevance for the overall study success in many study programs. Since the competence levels of candidates are different, lecturers struggle to mediate knowledge to such heterogeneous audiences simultaneously. In tacit consent, a catch-up of lower-skilled students is expected. Self-organized learning materials – which are often accessible via e-learning – are mostly unattractive, especially to lower-skilled students. Since gamification is successfully used in other areas of education to support motivation and performance, we propose gamification as a first success factor for mathematical exercises. Considering infrastructural aspects of higher education, we furthermore suggest the gamification systems’ ability to be extended by lecturers, its integrability into universities learning management systems and its affordability as success factors for mathematical e-learning exercises. Therefore, w
e implemented an open-source and easy-to-extend software approach, which is integrable into universities’ learning management systems. In an initial test run among first-year students (n = 115), we show how this approach improves learning and motivation at the same time. We discuss these results and propose this approach for testing in multiple group plans, to further investigate the influence of single game elements on motivation and learning.
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