DATA ANALYSIS FOR MEASURING EFFECTS OF GAMIFICATION IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

The problem of motivation and engagement in education is significant especially in e-learning environment and it is still being discussed, how gamification can contribute to this field. Moreover, influence of gamification, depending on utilized components (points, rankings, levels, etc.) may have different (even contrary) effects on different participants. Therefore, there is a need of deeper understanding of dependencies between engagement and implemented gamification elements. The aim of such analysis could be personalization of an e-learning system based on a model that enables management of gamification process individually for every participant. The first step towards this aim is the analysis of student data in a university-level e-learning course with gamification elements. The data (50 000 log samples from an e-learning course) was analysed in order to evaluate differences between the test (n=43) and control (n=36) groups of students. Initial results show statistically significant differences in engagement of students regarding activity in viewing of course resources (overall course activity, class tasks, homework, examples) and uploading homework. However, no statistically significant difference has been found regarding final grade. The analysis shows that implementation of the gamification components contributes to the engagement of students in an e-learning environment, not necessarily impacting the quality of the final grade.