On the role of gamification and localization in an open online learning environment

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have rapidly become an important tool for educational institutes in teaching programming. Nevertheless, high drop-out rates have always been a problem in online learning. As MOOCs have become an important part of modern education, reducing the drop-out rate has become a more and more relevant research problem. This work studies a nine-year-long period of maintaining an open, online learning environment of programming. The aim is to find out how the implementation of the learning environment could engage the students to learning and this way affect the drop-out rate. We provide an insight to experiences stemming from nine years of data collected with Javala, an online system created to help shifting from C++ to Java programming. The paper also discusses two key properties of Javala, gamification, and localization, together with data to assess their significance.