TOWARDS SOCIAL GAMIFICATION - IMPLEMENTING A SOCIAL GRAPH IN AN XMOOC PLATFORM

Abstract

High dropout rates and poor user participation are some of the major challenges for xMOOC providers. Similar to others, openHPI also faces these problems. Gamification is a mechanism that recently has been successfully employed to raise user motivation in web applications. A concept to gamify the openHPI platform has been proposed and implemented. Parts of it are already published on the platform. It is proposed that further gamification elements could be improved by applying the factor relatedness. Introducing a social graph to the platform, allowing users to establish connections to other users, is seen as a means to increase this relatedness. For example, the gamification element of a leaderboard gains a lot of relevance when a user finds herself amongst a list of her friends than a list of random strangers. The paper at hand introduces the implementation of a social graph in the context of openHPI's MOOC platform.