Using Player and World Representation Techniques from Computer Games to Improve Student Engagement

It has been widely documented that student-staff ratios continue to rise in higher education (H.E.) within the UK. As a consequence, H.E. institutions are becoming increasingly reliant on e-learning tools and this has increased difficulties that students experience in making the transition from secondary to tertiary education. In H.E., students generally receive far fewer contact hours, classes are larger, and they are often provided with much less personal guidance on how to progress through the educational process than they were used to at secondary level. E-learning system design is typically more focused on issues related to student and content management and less on individualized feedback and process based support. One of the issues with the design of current e-learning systems is that they are poor at representing individual student participation and students' progress through a course. This may be one of the contributing factors to diminishing student engagement in H.E. which ultimately results in poor grades and low retention rates. In this paper we address this issue by considering how player representation techniques commonly found computer games may inspire the design of e-learning systems so as to improve student engagement within an H.E. course.