Abstract
Engagement is essential in higher education but can be problematic to achieve. Successful games are, at their core, designed to be engaging experiences. In attempts to increase engagement in learning, there has been an increase in playful learning, game-based learning, and gamification as educators attempt to encourage engagement by explicitly harnessing the engaging attributes of games. Additionally, other attempts to increase engagement in education have implicitly resulted in the incorporation of game-like attributes. This chapter provides specific definitions of these terms and acknowledges that such attempts to increase engagement often offer an additional layer of extrinsic motivators. The authors propose that this can lead to unexpected and undesirable effects if extrinsic motivators are not well aligned to the desired behavior. This chapter presents a taxonomy of engagement strategies regarding their implicit and explicit game attributes and their implicit and explicit teaching attributes.
TopBackground
In this section, the authors briefly outline the importance of student engagement in higher education, and the desire to draw inspiration from games including a description of perspectives from games design on the potential of games as general learning and teaching artefacts, and the role that all games take learning. Next, some definitions of important relevant terms games, game-based learning and gamification are offered. Following this, some theories of motivation of engagement are outlined with explicit links to learning and to games where appropriate – highlighting some of the potential pitfalls that could arise when trying to influence specific behaviour.
Engagement in Higher Education
Student engagement in Higher (also called Tertiary) Education is of vital importance both to the success of education providers, and for the students that make use of them. The growth of Higher Education across the world (Choudaha & Van Rest, 2018) has seen increased staff-student rations and pressures on resources, as institutions adapt to manage larger classes. This growth has also created more varied student qualification profiles and a more varied student cohorts, leading to issues of engagement and support and the need for differentiated teaching, a new challenge for H.E.. Changes in student finance – such as the move in many countries to tuition fees – mean that many students try to balance work alongside their studies, whilst others have to balance family and caring commitments. These changes have an impact on student engagement and attainment. In the UK, Woodfield (2014) considered many of these issues, and how they correspond to different attainment and success outcomes in different disciplines, and later work has considered how to model and approach these diverse populations (Quaye et al, 2019). Work by the authors of this chapter (Gordon & Grey, 2018) considered approaches to measuring engagement, as well as different approaches to increase motivation, as considered below. The political pressure to increase participation in Higher Education in many countries is also altering the nature of students, and in many cases seems to have a negative impact on the level of engagement of these reluctant students.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Playful Learning: An inclusive term for taking a lusory approach to learning and teaching.
Misaligned Extrinsic Motivation: Extrinsic motivation that is not well aligned with the desired goal.
Gamification: Promotion of engagement through the application of game mechanics to non-game contexts.
Implicit Gamification: Extrinsic motivation created without an explicit attempt to gamify a task.
Extrinsic Motivation: Motivation to complete a task that is external to the task.
Game-Based Learning: Learning through playing a game.
Intrinsic Motivation: Motivation to complete a task that originates from the task itself.
Serious Games: Games created for a specific purpose of learning and teaching, often in the form or training simulators.
Aligned Extrinsic Motivation: Extrinsic motivation that is well aligned with the desired goal.
Explicit Gamification: Extrinsic motivation created in an explicit attempt to gamify a task.