MIRIADAX
MiriadaX is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform in Spanish and Portuguese. Telefonica created MiriadaX in 2012 to host free university-level courses in various disciplines. MiriadaX partners with Universities and Research Centers all over the world. In this partnership, Universities work together with Telefonica to develop MOOCs with the highest quality standards.
MiriadaX was also one of the first pioneers in integrating gamification elements to motivate students. It uses several mechanisms to gamify MOOCs, including points and badges. These game elements have solid evidence to foster student motivation and engagement.
Note that most of the links and resources are in Spanish or Portuguese.
I have selected this artifact because it was my first experience with gamification. This project motivated me to study for my Master's in Gamification and Storytelling at IEBS. Additionally, it is connected to the gamification theme in my framework.
To a certain extent, MiriadaX was the first MOOC platform to use game elements to engage with students. During my experience in Telefonica Educacion Digital, I had the opportunity to participate in the creation and implementation of badges and points (a powerful game element that we named karma). Badges are elements that represent a particular achievement. They tend to have a very aesthetically appealing and collectible design. For example, a badge can be unlocked after a certain number of posts in the online forum. Points or karma are a way to reinforce specific behaviors positively. Points are given to the user after doing something right. For example, give the user 10 points for each forum participation. Points are also a game element to collect and are usually displayed on a public leaderboard.
Participating in this project allowed me to explore gamification when it was just a new trend. I was in charge of the design of how each achievement connected to each badge and how points were allocated after each behavior. This experience motivated me to further research gamification and its endless possibilities. However, gamification is sometimes not understood. It is not just about implementing badges or other game elements but analyzing the user and what motivates them. Gamification researchers have developed different models to analyze users and game elements and measure intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. After having a clear picture of what is needed, you can start the design and development phases.
Implementing gamification in your organization or your projects is not an easy task. Many people do not believe in the value of gamification, so a great deal of change management is needed to start implementing a game design approach. From my experience, the best thing to do is to take baby steps and implement common elements such as badges and points. Once your organization reaches the right maturity level, you can include advanced game mechanics.
This project allowed me to start playing with game elements in learning projects. I fell in love with this approach to boost users' intrinsic motivation using game mechanics. It is amazing how a little bit of fun awakes the inner child. Gamification is not just a trend but a solid framework to motivate users in many scenarios.
Some of the images are property of Telefonica S.A and are publicly available.