The Learning Style of Gamers

Abstract

The use of gamification has shown to be an interesting approach to engage users in MOOCs. In this context, different game strategies, elements, and mechanics are applied to help to improve the teaching/learning process. When designing teaching/learning methods, teachers must take into account both gamification techniques and learning styles in order to encourage students and to improve their learning performance, respectively. However, while applying gamification and at the same time keep taking into account the corresponding learning styles, we may find some kinds of incompatibilities. Thus, what this chapter covers is the conducted experimental analysis aimed at exploring the viability of merging gamer's profiles and learning styles in a single multidimensional user profile. The obtained results expose that, with this approach, we are able to identify groups of students so that, while designing teaching/learning methods, we can take into account both learning styles to improve the learning performance and gamification techniques to motivate and encourage the student.