Gamification Assessment: A New Experience in the Degree of Business Administration and Management

Introduction

Higher education has recently been the object of numerous changes related to the implementation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In this sense, it is essential to train students in a comprehensive manner so that the university system can help each student develop the competencies required in each academic degree, as well as to promote a set of cross-disciplinary skills that every student should achieve when finishing their studies.

In the case of Spain, the Royal Decree 1393/2007 is the norm that establishes that the curricula should be designed with the aim that students obtain the necessary competencies to build their professional careers. The acquisition of these competencies required the modification of the role of the university teacher, which changed from being only a “source of knowledge” to becoming a “planner of teaching”, in a constructivist manner. The teacher is now mostly a “guide” in the teaching-learning process (Lavega et al., 2013), and should encourage the students’ active participation, promote teamwork, and attend to their learning needs (Pozuelo, Rodríguez, & Travé, 2012; Lavega et al., 2013). Thus, they should be mindful of how students are learning and support this learning process: “teachers should be individually concerned with them, in order to know the process that students are following, the level at which they are and within this type of things (...) the ability of empathizing with students and be able to work with them” (Zabalza, 2006: 98).

The use of appropriate teaching methodologies is a fundamental factor for developing these skills and, those should be active methodologies involving higher student participation (Gil et al., 2008). The use of active methodologies in the teaching-learning process ensures that the development of the students’ multiple competencies is guaranteed and fosters their development in an increasingly difficult and demanding labor context. With the use of active methodologies, the student is at the core of the teaching-learning process and becomes an active element in the development of his/her own curriculum (Pérez et al., 2008).

Taking these aspects into account, the main objective of this chapter is to evaluate an innovative learning experience that shows the importance and effectiveness of using active methodologies in developing students’ competencies. This innovative experience was based on gamification techniques. Gamification moves the dynamics of the games to the educational field in order to achieve better results: increase student motivation, acquire knowledge, reward specific skills, increase their participation in the classroom, etc. In our case, gamification was carried out through the use of Kahoot.

Kahoot is an innovative technology that is beginning to spread throughout Spanish universities, though it is already widely used in American universities. The use of Kahoot in the classroom was constant throughout the academic year, as will later be explained.