Gamification aims at addressing problems in various fields such as the high dropout rates, the lack of engagement, isolation, or the lack of personalisation faced by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Even though gamification is widely applied, not only in MOOCs, only few cases are meaningfully designed and empirically tested. The Gamification Design Process (GaDeP) aims to cover this gap. This article first briefly introduces GaDeP, presents the concept of meaningful gamification, and derives how it motivates the need for the Gamifire platform (as a scalable and platform-independent reference infrastructure for MOOC). Secondly, it defines the requirements for platformindependent gamification and describes the development of the Gamifire infrastructure. Thirdly we describe how Gamifire was successfully applied in four different cases. Finally, the applicability of GaDeP beyond MOOC is presented by reporting on a case study where GaDeP has been successfully applied by four student research and development projects. From both, the Gamifire cases and the GaDeP cases we derive the key contribution of this article: insights in the strengths and weaknesses of the Gamifire infrastructure as well as lessons learned about the applicability and limitations of the GaDeP framework. The paper ends detailing our future works and planned development activities.

Goal achievement is a measure of success; this could be particularly true in Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC), which are approached by a massive audience with an enormous variety of needs. Despite the huge number of MOOC users, it is unlikely to find solutions that allow them to pursue their individual goals. To overcome this issue, we have developed a first prototype of the Stimulated Planning (SP) game element, inspired by the implementation intention theory and by our experience with strategy games. In this study, the SP prototype is presented and its performance assessed via a new combination of three methodologies: usability test, eye tracking and the retrospective think-aloud technique. The results are promising and contribute to the field of gamification of MOOC at three levels: at conceptual level, by introducing and interpreting a new theory for gamification design; at design level, by demonstrating that is possible to design advanced gamification for MOOCs; and at assessment level, by applying a new methodology for MOOC gamification design assessment.

Gamification aims at addressing inherent problems of massive open online courses (MOOC): high dropouts, lack of engagement, isolation, lack of individualization. However, each MOOC platform offers different features and technical interfaces. Also, each platform collects different sets of data about user interaction, learning progress, or completion and success rates. This is an obstacle to the theoretically sound application of gamification in a vendor independent way and to the evaluation of the impact of gamification. We define our understanding of meaningful gamification, introduce requirements for platform-independent gamification, present the resulting Gamifire infrastructure, and describe application cases. We also point out planned development activities.

Gamification has gained great interest recently in several fields. However, while the literature reports that a gamification design relying on external motivation only can lead users to cognitive dissonance, most gamification approaches use points, badges and leaderboards as dominant game elements. We present our developed testable predictions with the aim of investigating additional motivational theories (flow and persuasion) to argue for a deeper integration of gamification and the learning content at hand. Relying on expert selected game elements, we consequently derive design considerations to create gMOOCs, gamified massive online open courses, designed according to the principles of flow and persuasion. Our findings are the basis of our experiment and a contribution to the development of a new theoretical design for gamification.

Gamification is well known as a design strategy used to generate a change in users’ behaviour, such as motivation. However, while in recent years interest in it has been growing, empirical evidence on the effects that the application of game elements can generate on users’ behaviour is still lacking. We present the results of a study as a step towards designing gamification with better understanding of the possible effects that each game element could generate on end users. By involving three groups of experts: game designers, learning scientists and specialists in technology-enhanced learning (TEL), we assessed a selected number of 21 game design patterns in relation to the effects these could generate on learning performance, goal achievement and engagement of learners if implemented in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC). Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected, 9 game elements have been selected to be further investigated.