A Qualitative Study of Non-Competitive Gamification in Online Courses

Introduction: This study qualitatively examined non-competitive gamification in online course design. Gamification involves applying game design elements in non-game activities, which often involve competitive approaches such as points, badges, and leaderboards. Unlike other studies, ours was proactive, non-Covid derived, non-competitive, and aimed at reducing students’ course-associated stress. Like other studies, ours involved gamification to increase engagement and fun. Our study, grounded in Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, involved non-competitive gamification as a response to students' tendencies to evaluate their learning as compared to others. The intent was to increase students’ self-efficacy, alongside increasing learning through non-competitive gaming to retain gamification’s fun, engagement, and learning, while reducing  course-related stress.

Goals/Methods:  The researcher spent a year prior to teaching the course researching and developing a non-competitive gamification design for a face-paced, high-level doctoral research methods course. Prior to this addition, students maintained high learning and academic achievement, yet had higher stress, lower satisfaction, and lower self-efficacy as researchers in the summer online course compared with the long-semester, face-to-face version. Since the university has rivers all around it and through it, the researcher developed a Riverway Journey visualization akin to world exploration, collecting, and/or resource acquisition genres of gaming. Students explored modules and collected skills as their resources from two riverway stops per week. The researcher used end-of-course anonymous Likert-scaled and open-ended response evaluations to answer the research question: How did adding the non-competitive gamification influence students online course experiences?

Results: Students rated the course as a perfect 5/5 in all evaluative categories. Additionally, the Riverway Journey gamification was mentioned as a positive, stress reducing, community building, and fun element throughout the open-ended responses.

Conclusions: While adding non-competitive gamification to online courses needs more investigation, this study suggests it was a positive pedagogical tool for online learning even in advanced content areas.