This chapter presents an experience of university distance education carried out during the COVID-19 emergency, using gamification to make teaching more engaging and motivating for students. In particular, the proposed work is aimed at addressing two different needs: 1) to proactively deal with the exceptional consequences due to COVID-19 in the educational field and 2) to innovate teaching practices by promoting an active learning approach. Hence, game elements and game design techniques were used to design a course program aimed at fostering a high degree of involvement among students to increase both personal satisfaction and student performance. Results confirm that the set educational path, giving greater emphasis to the social, emotional, and experiential dimensions, actively engaged students in the learning process, recording a high percentage of appreciation for the course.
TopIntroduction
The dramatic health emergency caused by the spread of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020 has shocked the world, producing serious consequences in various aspects of daily life. Most of the countries declared a state of total lockdown, they have stopped the educational activities or moved part of them or all, via the web, adopting Distance Education. For the first time, schools, universities, and other educational institutions were confronted with a series of problems that were not at all easy to solve.
The need to carry out teaching activities exclusively at distance implies both looking differently at the educational relationship between teachers, students and knowledge, and rethinking space, time, and tools.
However, distance education cannot just be thought of as a transposition of the real classroom with the virtual one.
Thus, the emergency led to a series of experimentation in which digital technologies and tools were extensively used to ensure continuity in teaching and learning.
Due the stopping of face-to-face teaching, and the consequent starting of distance education “experimentations” teachers of all levels had to use tools and technologies, including Open Source (Muoio, 2018), originally designed for collaborative work in the corporate environment.
In recent years, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) brought a radical change in different areas of knowledge. Different authors (Edmonds et al., 2005; Ott, Pozzi, 2010; Aqda et al., 2011; Daud and Zakaria, 2012) highlight how their pervasive use in any field of the society, can be exploited to learn in new ways, to develop individuality and initiative, but at the same time, the collaborative and cooperative learning, and creativity.
The use of technologies in educational context refers to the constructivist perspective (Piaget, 1967; Papert, 1984, 1986, 1991) according to which learners have an active role in the knowledge acquisition process. Teachers guide subjects in these processes, and students “learn by doing” through real experiences. Different studies (Šimonová and Bílek, 2012; Cárdenas et al., 2016; Gabriele et al., 2017; Gabriele et al., 2019; Bilotta et al., 2020) underline how ICTs, if well integrated in the didactic context, can be really motivating and engaging tools; they can promote an active, collaborative, participative and problem-based learning; they can support the acquisition of workgroup skills and can foster creativity and self-reflection. ICTs, multimedia environments combining images, sounds and animations, emotionally involve the user in the learning processes (Psomos, Kordaki, 2015; Hartsell, 2017).
Taking into account these perspectives, in the COVID-19 educational emergency, many software applications have been adapted to support educational processes, although, in some cases, not suitable to replace face-to-face teaching activities.
This complex phase based on distance learning has been animated by discussions, doubts, difficulties and questions about the relationship between digital media and teaching.
This framework invites us to consider two issues: the concrete ways in which technologies are currently used in educational contexts; the need to integrate them into an overall project that takes into account the organisation of the activities, teaching and learning methodologies and strategies.
The distance learning introduced in this period is a direct consequence of emergence and not of careful work on the teaching approach. In most cases, in the absence of valid pre-existing strategies, face-to-face lessons, with their specific dynamics, were replicated online.
For several years, digital technologies and competences have been the subject of recommendations, documents and indications from various national and international bodies.