The Impact of Virtual Achievements on Online Learning Applications
Venkata Sai Bhargav Bathini, Lokesh Meesala, Ahamad Shaik, Hrushyang Adloori
TL;DR
The paper investigates whether virtual achievements like badges and leaderboards can boost engagement in online learning apps. It adopts a within-subject design by introducing a real-time leaderboard into the UPSC Pre Android app and measuring engagement with Firebase Analytics across two conditions. The analysis reveals a significant increase in engagement when the leaderboard is enabled, with participants reporting competitive enjoyment. The findings offer practical guidance for designing engaging mobile learning experiences and suggest potential applicability to other domains beyond education.
Abstract
In recent times a number of platforms are using badge-based achievements or leaderboards to increase user involvement and participation. Due to recent advancements, there is a question of up to what extent virtual achievement systems have on users using particular platforms. Here in this paper, we discuss measuring the impact of the leaderboard-based achievement system by integrating it into an online learning android application UPSC Pre that has thousands of questions and answers categorized topic wise related to UPSC exams, one of the toughest exams to crack in the world. We are conducting the experiment on 10 randomly chosen students who are using the app in a controlled setting and the data measurement is done using the Firebase Analytics tool by Google. We observed that the students using the leaderboard have increased participation without any reductions in their quality and the time of using the platform has increased compared to previous engagements. Students who participated in the experiment felt the leaderboard was competitive and enjoyed gaining positions on the leaderboard and wanted it in the User interface for other platforms as well. The research has an impact in designing the learning applications to cater and improve the user experience in the future. The results are not limited to educational purposes but can be expanded to other fields such as self development applications, other research projects, Gaming industry and many more.