Could Gamification Designs Enhance Online Learning Through Personalization? Lessons from a Field Experiment.

Online learning is of growing importance to institutions and learners, and the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored its importance even more. Because learner autonomy is relatively high in these online environments, they must engage in self-regulated learning processes to achieve successful learning outcomes, but studies show that most learners are not able to do so. Hence, in this longitudinal field experiment, using a massively open online course (MOOCs), a type of online learning environment, we investigate whether gamified interventions through the learning platform can foster learners to engage in self-regulated learning processes and improve their learning outcomes. We find that gamification interventions are indeed useful, but for these gamification interventions to succeed, they must be designed to provide personalized feedback to learners that match with their learning goal-orientation. Overall, our findings point to the fact that gamification designs in online learning platforms can enhance learners' engagement and learning outcomes, but they must be personalized. A one-size-fits-all approach to gamification design in online learning just does not work and may even backfire to reduce the engagement of some learners. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of online learning. As learner autonomy is relatively high in online environments, learners must engage in self-regulated learning (SRL) to achieve optimal learning outcomes. Because most learners are unable to consistently engage in SRL, gamification interventions are being implemented to improve SRL engagement; however, mixed results cast doubt on the efficacy of this approach. Massively open online courses (MOOCs), a type of online learning environment, are currently experiencing rapid growth due to widespread adoption by many institutions. In MOOCs, there is no instructor intervention; hence, students have difficulty regulating their own learning and are easily distracted. Therefore, this study investigates whether mixed-research results regarding the efficacy of gamification can be attributed to lack of attention to individual learner traits during design. For this purpose, the study analyzes MOOCs as an instance of online learning by applying SRL theory and gamification principles. We altered a traditional MOOC platform to provide different types of gamified performance feedback to facilitate learners' SRL engagement. We then examined whether this matched with goal orientation, an individual learner trait to influence SRL and learning outcomes. Using learning-analytics tools, we tracked 760 college students' SRL engagement on a MOOC platform over five weeks. As theorized, SRL engagement and learning outcomes of participants who had a strong performance-avoidance goal orientation increased with positively framed performance feedback that involved no social comparisons; however, the same feedback had a negative impact on participants with a strong mastery goal orientation. Our findings add to SRL theory by demonstrating that gamification designs can enhance SRL engagement and learning outcomes in online learning, but with a caveat—this occurs only when there is a match with learner traits—confirming the gamification principle stating that task improvements and meaningful engagement can only occur through thoughtful gamification design. History: Raghu Santanam, Senior Editor; J. J. Hsieh, Associate Editor. Funding: Financial supported from the University Grants Committee's (UGC's) Special Grant for the Strategic Development of Virtual Teaching and Learning [Project Number 6430900], the UGC Teaching and Learning Funding [Project Numbers 6391211 and 6391001], and the Digital Innovation Laboratory of Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.1123. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]