Design and Evaluation of a Gamification-based Information System for Improving Student Attendance

Abstract

Declining student attendance is a recurring concern in most educational environments, including tertiary education. Depending on the assumed cause of low attendance, different approaches have been proposed as a means of intervention for mitigating the problem. On the other hand, gamification is a relatively new approach that aims to increase engagement of participants in non-game contexts by utilizing techniques developed for and used in computer games. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that aims at intervening by applying gamification techniques for the purpose of increasing the extrinsic motivation for attendance in tertiary-level education settings. The approach is based on a cloud-based platform which features web and mobile clients. The main stakeholders are the lecturers, who can configure the environment, and the students who are the targeted participants. Unlike similar works, this approach aims at improving the student attendance at a wider scale, e.g. at the programme level rather than focusing on individual modules or classes. Additionally, it provides fine customization allowing the lecturers to opt in with custom settings. Finally, the paper describes some early results and paves the road for an extensive evaluation.