Enhancing learner's emotional engagement through a gameful interface in E-learning systems

Abstract

An increasing number of students are learning in digitalized education environments. For younger generations of students who have grown up participating in digital environments and virtual reality, E-learning is considered to be an appropriate educational platform. In particular, video lectures are regarded as key component of E-learning systems. However, online lecture systems have limitations in sustainability due to a lack of motivation on the part of the learner. To overcome the limitations of E-learning, we had attention to educational psychology researches. In that field, “positive emotion in education” to reach higher educational achievement is getting more consideration. Control-value theory is based on that perspective. According to the theory, emotions play critical roles in education. In the theory, perceived controllability and value are main factors to arouse achievement emotions. In other words, learner’s perception should be regarded important. Play is an effective way of changing user perception of learning situation. Although play have been widely ignored in education fields, it had been proved that play is important role in learning and human development in long term. Moreover, contemporary education researchers have pointed out play experience and learning experience can be the same. Especially in digital space, rich and connected contents propose diverse opportunity to combine play and learning. Game is remarkable solutions of them all. Game has potential to generate immersive, interactive learning experience within playful attitude. That is because game is effective way of enhancing emotional engagement to media. We focused on enhancing emotional engagement with ‘gameful design’. By gameful design, we mean extending game thinking to non-game contexts. In this study, we applied gameful design to video lecturing systems, and we expected this design to enhance emotional engagement in learning, thereby increasing educational achievement. ...