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Online education diverges from traditional education methods for its absence of direct interaction between students and teachers. The latter, however, is one of the important drivers of engaging learners with the learning process (Muntean, 2011). Meanwhile, low engagement, or its complete absence, often leads to an increased students' dropout. This constitutes a need for new types of online practices that could overcome the need for social interaction that is usually expected in an offline setting. The lack of such interaction has often been supplemented by infusing gamification elements, aiming to engage users and develop a new long-lasting experience (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). Consequently, gamification becomes a part of multiple educational online platforms as a tool to keep the learner studying and interacting with the platform (Chang & Wei, 2016). However, the revealed research on dropout rates in online learning and attempts to build models, predicting the reasons for a dropout, remain unclear for scholars (Willging & Johnson, 2009). Even though the large scale study of Niemi & Gitin (2012), shows some predictive power of personal factors, contributing to the chance of online course completion, other research suggests a closer look at platform characteristics, course design and the use of gamification practices, to increase learners’ engagement and decrease dropout (Herodotou & Mystakidis, 2015).
Therefore, technological characteristics of the platform and course design remain central in online learning research (Means et al., 2009). In combining these, the research had addressed the problem of dropout, in online learning, by assessing the platform affordances and design and learners’ goals. This holistic approach of affordances theory, as everyday technology usage, attracts considerable interest among the scholars (Conole & Dyke, 2004). The concept of affordances, introduced by Gibson (1977), and further developed by Norman (1999), merges the perspective of perceptive psychology and interface design. The main assumption of this theory is that technology offers multiple affordances for users, which, unlike graphical images, are not visible. Conversely, affordances should be perceived intuitively, which makes design merely a tool for easier platform navigation. Ever since, the approach received its popularity in communication and design research (Anderson & Robey, 2017; Limperos et al., 2015), and also in the field of online learning (Badía et al., 2011; Cheng, 2014; Park & Lim, 2019; Zembylas & Vrasidas, 2004). In their research, scholars attempt to reveal the initial structure of affordances in different contexts; interaction between users and educational online platforms; interrelation between affordances usage or perception and predictors, such as engagement and motivation. Therefore, studying affordances in online learning is expected to be helpful to understand the experience of users and clarify its relation to the process of engagement.
However, there is a difference in the scholarly conceptualization of affordances. Two main conceptual approaches are currently dominating in academic research: affordances, understood as the relationships between users and technology (Conole & Dyke, 2004), and the concept of ‘perceived affordances’ (Codish & Ravid, 2014; Jia, 2018). In this study, authors argue it is relevant to explore the possible use of suggested affordances and unintended consequences. This approach focuses on reciprocal interaction between users and the educational online platform, applicably, in the context of online education.
The aforementioned research of online learning platforms affordances and other structural or architectural elements, often avoid the issue of gamification. Most educational online learning platforms are now incorporating elements of gamification to enhance user engagement and, therefore, retain users (Domínguez et al., 2013). Despite the concept novelty, a growing body of research addresses this issue through a variety of perspectives. Scholars study context in which gamification is applied (Hamari et al., 2014), and the most effective elements and mechanics (Deterding et al., 2011; Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). Moreover, a significant amount of research in the domain of online learning relates to gamification and its influence on user engagement or involvement (Alharthi & Parrish, 2017; Kankanhalli et al., 2012; Muntean, 2011), and effective and perceived learning (Dicheva et al., 2015). Despite this, a review of the literature shows that the results of empirical studies remain controversial. Some reveal the positive effects of gamification (Hamari et al., 2014), while another considers that gamification may be perceived as annoying and become a reason for learning platform abandonment (Jia, 2018).