Activity completion
I started gamifying my course in a bid to increase engagement with Moodle, as my course is full of really useful organisational tools (or at least I think they’re useful…). There are a few ways to measure engagement with a VLE/LMS, and this week I decided to have a look at activity completion rates. Here is a visual representation of the activity completed/not completed by both groups of students.
| Gamified | Non-gamified |
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| Click here for full size image | Click here for full size image |
Activity completion gamified vs. non-gamified Moodle course
Activity completion statistics – bold is better
You can see at first glance that there are some disparities between the two courses. Here are some conclusions.
No huge differences
As you can see from the visualisations, although there are some differences between the two courses, it isn’t exactly a void (+10% in favour of the gamified course). Aside from 2 or 3 students, most have been doing their work relatively conscientiously. Most of the activities that have not been completed are optional and might be completed later in the course – full statistical analysis will be available in early July 2013.
Gamified students complete more activities
Nothing much to say here. Students enrolled in the gamified course have an average completion rate of 72%, whilst students enrolled in the non-gamified course have an average completion rate of 66%.
Gamified students complete more meaningful activities
This is where things start to get interesting. Students were encouraged to share their first Scratch creations with their peers using the database, and also to attempt quizzes on Scratch blocks. None of these activities were compulsory but strongly encouraged.
46% of students in the non-gamified course completed the Scratch database activity vs. 83% for the gamified course. If you are equally mathematically challenged as I am, that’s almost twice as many students completing the task. This activity is best witnessed in the classroom as students download each other’s creations and tinker with it – a remixing of sorts.
Similar findings for the quizzes, although the difference isn’t quite as striking (see visuals for the full picture). More students in the gamified course have attempted quizzes than in the non-gamified course.
Gamified students try harder to complete activities
Not only did more students in the gamified course complete the database activity, they also shared more creations (70 vs. 51). They also attempted the quizzes more times (112 vs. 79).
Gamification is no cure for disappointment
I am disappointed that so few students read the level descriptors for the task. It could be that students made use of the level descriptor displays in my classroom, although from my observations I highly doubt that.
Badges
As explained in a previous post, I have gamified my course using badges. Only the students enrolled in the gamified course are able to unlock badges, but it is possible to look at what badges students in the non-gamified group would have unlocked, looking at the activity completion report, and a bit of Excel trickery. Here is what it would look like:
| Gamified | Non-gamified |
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| Click here for full size image | Click here for full size image |
Students enrolled in the gamified course have unlocked 87 badges, whilst students enrolled in the non-gamified course would have unlocked 69 badges. This difference of 18 might not sound very significant, but to me it is huge, here is why. If you look closely at the graphics, you will notice that the first 2 badges have been unlocked by pretty much everyone, the first one was unlocked during the first lesson (students had to complete the activities to set up their workspace) and the second one was compulsory homework (install Scratch on home computer). The remaining 4 badges are linked to activities that students were encouraged to complete, but not forced to do (sharing Scratch animations, and attempt quizzes). It is clear that students enrolled in the gamified course took more care completing the optional activities than their non-gamified counterparts.
Summary
Last week it wasn’t so clear who was the most engaged with my Moodle course. With the numbers I have looked at this week, I can argue that the students in the gamified course are paying more attention to completing activities. I am really looking forward to the end of this unit of work to have a full picture (and also to enjoy the summer holidays!).
Activity completion & other useful stats Bold is better
Next week’s post will be more technical and I’ll share some MySQL queries to extract useful completion statistics out of your Moodle database. Stay tuned.