Teaching Online EMI Mathematics Courses: A Proposal to Combine Gamification and Adaptive Learning

Introduction

One sector where gamification has been widely adopted is education, mainly because of its potential to engage and motivate students. Many studies show that gamification enhances the Mathematics learning experience (Dichev & Dicheva 2017; Smiderle et al. 2020). Gamification can be successfully adopted in higher education contexts (Jurgelaitis et al. 2019) and in case of distance learning, to compensate for the lack of interaction (De la Peña et al. 2021). The pedagogical basis of gamifying learning is that elements, such as the ones that can be found in games (like points, stories, rankings, characters), can be added to learning activities in order to create an immersive environment, similar to what happens in games (Codish & Ravid, 2015). This may lead to a simple approach to gamification, where game mechanics alone can engage learners in a productive learning experience. The authors believe that gamification can be adopted as methodology to simplify the students’ approach to the disciplines and can be fruitfully paired with the experience of creating distance courses, the use of adaptive learning, of formative assessment and interactive feedback. These strategies may contribute to the improvement of student access and success in open online undergraduate and graduate Mathematics courses. In particular, in the present work two main adoptions of those strategies with gamification will be analyzed, especially in connection in English-taught courses, taking into account that Mathematics is an international language.

The first experience refers to start@unito (Bruschi et al., 2021; Marchisio et al. 2019; Marchisio et al., 2020), a project of the University of Turin which delivers open and free online courses that allow students to have an overview of university modules, thus helping them in the transition from school to university and in being successful with first-year exams. Another goal of start@unito is to promote internationalization: in fact, some online courses are taught entirely in English, including one of the two pillars of this work, a Mathematical Modelling module for undergraduates. The module presents mathematical theory and models, and proposes problems chosen from common experiences. An important aspect of this module is the support received by a linguistic expert while developing course contents.

The second experience refers to the Erasmus+ Project SMART, Science and Mathematics Advanced Research in good Teaching, a virtual learning environment for the training of European STEM teachers (Brancaccio et al., 2019; Brancaccio et al., 2015). The project seeks to improve teachers’ professional competences, increase opportunities for learning mobility, and strengthen cooperation between the world of education and the world of work. The second pillar of this work is the Mathematical Modelling course, with the same name as the previous one but with a different rationale. In this course, teachers can find a self-paced online training course on innovative methodologies such as problem solving using interactive technologies and automatic formative assessment, and ready to use validated materials, referring to the four main areas in PISA 2015 school Mathematics framework (OECD, 2017): Quantity, Space and shape, Change and relations, and Uncertainty.

The purpose of the present work is to discuss the possibility of combining adaptive learning with gamification techniques to enhance and facilitate the English-mediated learning process (Perez and Masegosa 2020; Seiz Ortiz and Barrera Puerto 2018). The work discusses how learning may benefit from the integration of both teaching tools in English-Medium Instruction (EMI) university teaching of Mathematics, which adds the linguistic challenge to the already existing challenges of STEM education.