Meaningful Gamification in MOOCs. Designing and Examining Learner Engagement in the Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub

Learner engagement and sustained motivation belong to some central challenges in designing and facilitating Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). One approach to face this challenge has been the use of gamification as an attempt to enhance learner engagement and motivation through the use of game-related elements such as levels, leaderboards, points and badges. While gamification has been successfully implemented in small-scale learning designs, research on gamification in MOOCs is still in its early stages. This paper addresses this research gap and presents a meaningful gamification approach applied to the design and facilitation of a series of eight mini-MOOCs in a learning environment called Open Virtual Mobility Learning Hub (OpenVM Hub). The paper examines learner experience in meaningfully gamified MOOCs in the OpenVM Learning Hub by analysing data from the evaluation survey answered by 945 learners. The results of the data analysis indicate that meaningful gamification can be considered a valuable method for designing engaging MOOCs, especially if it is combined with a modular and flexible mini-MOOC approach, which focuses on short learning events, light bits of learning content and a diversity of media formats used to support learning.