Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been established as a complement or alternative to other more traditional forms of teaching and learning (e.g., face-to-face, blended learning). Despite their relevant benefits (e.g., open access to education from prestigious universities), student disengagement has been identified as an important shortcoming, contributing to high drop out rates. In order to overcome this problem, rewardbased gamification has been proposed as a promising strategy to increase student engagement in MOOCs, following its success in other small-scale educational contexts. However, the addition of gamification strategies implies a number of orchestration tasks (e.g., design, instantiation, management) that have to be carried by course practitioners (instructional designers, instructors, teacher assistants, etc.). Given this context, this dissertation aims to support MOOC practitioners in the design, instantiation and management of reward-based strategies in MOOC environments to promote students' engagement. To this end, this dissertation proposes the attainment of three goals by following the System Design Research Methodology.The first goal deals with understanding whether reward-based strategies provide fruitful effects on student engagement in MOOCs. The distinctive features of MOOCs (e.g., massive number of participants, participants' background heterogeneity, asynchronous interaction) might compromise the benefits observed in small-scale educational environments. A systematic literature review performed within the context of this dissertation, revealed a lack of empirical studies performed in real MOOC environments, thus hindering the understanding of how these strategies affect student engagement. In this sense, three empirical studies were carried out in the context of this dissertation. The three studies involved MOOCs that incorporated reward-based strategies, helping understand their effects, and gaining insights about potential design guidelines that might eventually be used by practitioners in the design of future MOOCs.The second goal refers to the need of providing practitioners with computer-interpretable models to represent MOOC learning designs, incorporating reward-based strategies, thus supporting their automatic instantiation and management (e.g., reward-issuing procedure). A feature analysis of MOOC platforms and gamification systems identified their limited support regarding the representation of reward-based strategies in MOOC platforms' native tools. Given this context, this dissertation presents a data model (GamiTool-DM) that supports the computer-interpretable representation of reward-based strategies in MOOCs with a fine-grained level of detail, thus allowing to align practitioners' gamification purposes with the course pedagogical goals.The aforementioned feature analysis also revealed that current MOOC platforms and gamification systems present some limitations regarding the cognitive and timely affordable orchestration of these strategies (e.g., usable authoring to...

Los cursos online masivos y abiertos (MOOC: Massive Open Online Courses) presentan un gran potencial para permitir el acceso a la educación superior a cualquier estudiante de manera gratuita y que tenga la posibilidad de acceder a Internet. Sin embargo, su modelo de enseñanza es habitualmente criticado, y múltiples investigadores defienden la aplicación de pedagogías activas para tratar de alcanzar un mejor aprendizaje, como ya es frecuente en el aula presencial. Las diferencias de contexto en estos cursos, como la heterogeneidad de perfiles, la escala o el asincronismo se argumentan con frecuencia como limitadores. Este artículo presenta la exploración de veinte cursos masivos, en diferentes idiomas, en distintas plataformas y en diversos dominios de conocimiento, con el objetivo de analizar en detalle el uso del aprendizaje colaborativo y de la gamificación en los mencionados cursos. Las evidencias encontradas permiten concluir que, a pesar de que hay una preocupación por fomentar la interacción social, no existe una intención pedagógica en ella; y además, si se produce el aprendizaje colaborativo es de manera espontánea, no buscada como el eje central del proceso en el diseño instruccional. Por otro lado, la gamificación sí está presente como elemento motivador, pero está dirigida fundamentalmente a premiar acciones individuales de los estudiantes, no los logros colectivos. También se observa que las distintas plataformas MOOC frecuentan ser complementadas con otras herramientas para tratar de apoyar la interacción de los participantes y la gamificación.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have significantly disrupted Higher Education. Usually, these online courses offer universal access to learning, generating new challenges regarding the form they are taught and the pedagogical approaches used. In fact, despite the benefits of MOOCs in Higher Education (e.g. ubiquitous and free access to learning), these courses are frequently critized due to their content-based teaching models. Therefore, the application of strategies promoting active learning is presented as a potential technique to change these models and to improve the student participation and dropout rates. This paper reflects on the potential benefits of gamification and collaboration to enhance and motivate student involvement in MOOCs. To this end, a Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology has been applied aiming to show evidence of these pedagogical innovations in three MOOCs carried out by the University of Valladolid (Spain). The outcomes of this process show the potential benefits of gamification and collaboration in MOOCs when taking into account some concrete aspects during the design and/or co-design of the courses.