The Role of Gamification in Designing an Online Course

Online learning is an area that has expanded greatly over the past few years. Many teachers and universities are considering how to best provide their learners with quality online lessons. However, creating an online course is not quite as simple as taking classroom materials and uploading them on a classroom management system. There are several issues for consideration when designing a course: for example, issues of learner styles, motivation, and feedback. This paper looks at these issues in light of the relatively new concept of “gamification.” Gamification, quite simply, is taking elements of games and introducing them into non-game situations. While the idea of using games in the classroom has been with us as long as teachers have been teaching and students have been learning, it is still a new phenomenon in turns of research into how game elements can be used in non- game contexts. This article will introduce common game elements such as social graphs, levels, points, quests, and avatars to provide examples that help to illustrate how they can be built into an online course.