Gamifire - A Scalable, Platform-Independent Infrastructure for Meaningful Gamification of MOOCs

Abstract

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 platformindependent gamification, present the resulting Gamifire infrastructure, and describe application cases. We also point out planned development activities.