Learning strategies in the digitalization era are vastly expanding. Students are comprised of the millennials for whom life cannot be separated from technology and the internet. The ever-expanding technology has posed new challenge on the teaching process of millennials, and one of which is the growing importance and increased involvement of technology that empower a host of new learning tools. One of the most prominent open-access teaching/learning tool is Kahoot! This chapter aims to complement studies about the use of game-based methods at higher education. The survey was conducted for 1 year at a university located in a small city in Indonesia. A total of 415 students were actively involved in measuring their perceptions of games-based learning tools called Kahoot! Furthermore, this study also measured differences in outcomes between faculties, types of subjects, and commonly used research methods. The result shows that Kahoot! positively impacts student academic achievement as measured by student motivation, enjoyment, engagement, and concentration.
TopIntroduction
Indonesian has witnessed major improvement on access to education in the last few decades (Rosser, 2018). According to the Director General of Learning and Student Affairs (2017), education in Indonesia is getting better. Based on the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, Indonesia is ranked 62 out of 72 countries in the world (youthcorpsindonesia, 2017). This position has increased since 2017 in which Indonesia entered the World Education Ranking issued by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that ranked 57th out of 65 countries (Kabar Rantau, 2017). Based on another survey, Ali (2018) argues that Indonesia was in 108th position in the world with a score of 0.603. In general, the quality of education in Indonesia is still below Palestine, Samoa and Mongolia. Based on the survey, 44% of the population completed secondary education while 11% of the students failed to complete their education or dropped out of school.
The poor quality of education in Indonesia caused by various factors. In addition to curriculum issues (Suratno, 2016), Sukasni & Efendy (2017) added such factors as costs, educational goals, national exams, and facilities. The teaching system plays an important role in increasing the effectiveness of learning, according to Zulfikar (2009), improving the quality of teaching can be done through mentoring and recruitment of the instructors, but the application of learning assessment system is also another important matter that must be considered. Firman and Tola (2014) argues that teaching process in Indonesia requires ICT intervention as an important part of the curriculum and teaching tools for schools, universities and training institutions. Thus, teachers in Indonesia must be adept at utilizing ICT and are not resisting to adopt its latest development (Harendita, 2013). Moreover, lecturers should be able to keep up with every technological progress so that education can be more dynamic. One of the uses of technology in teaching is to get familiar with the use of ICT in the teaching process including the use of game-based teaching methods.
KUK et al. (2012) suggested that the game-based learning model is a new teaching strategy in the field of computer engineering. Pivec & Dziabenko (2004) has introduced games at the University. Gamification can be used across different levels of education and subjects (Bicen & Kocakoyun, 2018). Students can learn the topics more easily and handle difficult material in a fun way. Kahoot! is a popular e-learning that promotes metacognitive activeness in class and student attendance in college, both undergraduate and postgraduate.
Garut University is one of the private universities in Indonesia, located in Garut Regency, Indonesia. Kahoot! has been introduced and used at Garut University as a teaching tool since 2017 in several courses and several classes. Kahoot is commonly used as an evaluation activity before the lecture begins which is called readiness acceptance test – a kind of pretest – or becomes part of the quiz activity (post-test). The purpose of this study is to measure the effectiveness of Kahoot! in facilitating the students understanding, academic achievement and activeness. As its implication, the outcome of this study can be used as a consideration for the integration of ICT-based learning tools in overall teaching methods at Garut University in particular and in various campuses in Indonesia in general.