Gamification of Web-Based Learning Services

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game contexts like office work or learning. Due to its deep implications on human behavior, there are many critical voices but in principle the gamification of learning management systems is possible and different solutions are on the market. The situation is very different when users are mashing-up their personal learning environments from different Web-based learning services. This paper discusses the theoretical and technical gamification challenges of personal learning systems. It comes up with a framework that allows learning communities and individual learners even without programming experience to configure game elements and game rules in an intuitive, fine-granular and flexible way for existing Web-based learning services. To avoid changing existing code it uses aspect-oriented programming techniques. The evaluation showed that users were able to understand the concepts and could gamify Web-based learning services more easily. The gamification framework is available as open source software and will lead to more, easier and dynamic gamification of existing Web-based learning services.