Engaging Students: Using Gamification to Engage the Online Learning Experience

Gamification is widely used in many corporations today to ‘engage’ their employees in meeting or exceeding sales and training goals. We will explore the use of gamification to optimize instructor engagement, enhance student community, and engage student’s interaction with challenging concepts in the online classroom.

The Gen Y and Gen Z learners expect courses to encourage them creatively, while promoting opportunities to think and analyze the content through the use of new technologies. Implementation of gamification in courses proves to re-energize learners, create healthy competition, and increase learning engagement, while at the same time, adding some excitement and fun to the online classroom. Online professors need to be aware of gamification and its impact on students to successfully facilitate and manage “gamified” courses.

• Tina Serafini, Kaplan University, Clearfield, PA, USA
• Risa Blair, Kaplan University, Miami, FL, USA