How to play a MOOC: Practices and simulation

Massive Open Online Courses are important online study resources. They aim at providing online education to an increasingly large and heterogeneous audience: school pupils, university students or professionals who intend to acquire or develop their skill to better respond to market needs. The growing number of learners (more than 100 million globally at the moment, https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-stats-2019/) and courses (over 11 thousand, ibidem) reveals new and unprecedented scenarios in lifelong learning paths. Offering educational products to such an audience requires producers – not only private individuals but also public entities – to evaluate new teaching methods and methodologies for distance learning, in order to encourage participation and reduce their dropping out. Using gamification within an online course seems to contribute to the growth of users’ participation rate, as well as to increase the course completion rate. In this work, the authors will show the interactive solutions that two Italian universities, the University of Naples Federico II – with its Federica Web Learning branch – and the University of Padua set up for their MOOC-based courses.