Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers and educators have moved from teaching face-to-face to teaching entirely online. This has been a shock for many of our teachers. Keeping students engaged and on-task while teaching online has been a daunting challenge that most educators around the world encounter. In this chapter we propose gamification as a formative assessment tool to encourage students to participate in the learning process and to support learners to engage more in the teaching materials. Gamification was found effective in blended learning and in face-to-face teaching (Tan & Hew, 2016; Zainuddin, Shujahat, Haruna, & Chu, 2019). Therefore, we interviewed 13 English teachers to explore the challenges that they encountered regarding students’ engagement and teaching online. They were asked if gamification can alleviate these challenges. The results of the interviews indicate that engaging students in the teaching materials was a serious challenge that could pose problems for teachers while teaching online. The findings of the interviews also confirmed that gamification could be an effective way of teaching online and can assist students to perform well in the academic tests. It can foster students’ engagement. We also discuss implications for practice and recommendations for further research based on our findings.
Gamification is the process of using game thinking and game dynamics to engage audiences and solve problems.
Gabe Zichermann
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Appendix 1
Appendix 1
I am conducting research about how to make students more engaged with the teaching materials when learning online during COVID-19 pandemic and after it. Would you please help me answer the following questions (for English teachers teaching grade 9–12):
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Do you think that engaging students in the learning process is a challenge that might face English teachers when teaching online? The respondents can choose one of these three answers: Yes, maybe, and no.
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Do you think that students were engaged when they learned English during COVID-19 pandemic using Google Classroom platform? Why or why not?
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What do you suggest to make students more engaged with the teaching materials?
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If I would suggest that you, as a teacher, can use gamification while you are teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic and after it, do you think that would make students more engaged? Why or why not? (Gamification is using game elements in nongame context such as using Kahoot, Socrative, Quizizz.)
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Do you have any other comments related to students’ engagement and gamification?
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Al Breiki, M., Yahaya, W.A.J.W. (2021). Using Gamification to Promote Students’ Engagement While Teaching Online During COVID-19. In: Fayed, I., Cummings, J. (eds) Teaching in the PostCOVID-19 Era. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74088-7_44
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