Analysis of the treatment of gamification in the field of university distance learning

Enfoque

Gamification, generally understood as the application of game design elements in non-game environments, is becoming increasingly important thanks, among other aspects, to the advance of new technologies and the transformation of society towards increasingly digital environments. In the field of education, gamified experiences in the teaching-learning process of students have been validated by high rates of student motivation and engagement. In this field, university entities -although to a lesser extent than education centers of other academic levels- join gamified teaching practices with positive results in the evolution of knowledge acquisition by students. In the case of virtual teaching practice in the university environment, gamification is also presented as an attractive tool, although adapted to its peculiarities. The aim of this article is to analyze the progression and trends of research on gamification in distance university teaching and to propose learning strategies based on good practices collected in high impact scientific journal articles. For this purpose, a systematic review of the scientific literature on the subject under study and a bibliometric analysis of all the articles found in the Scopus database, more than 750, have been carried out using the VOSviewer software. From the results found, it is striking the increase of interest in gamification in the university field by the scientific community in the last decade, especially in the last five years, when more than twice as many scientific papers are published than during the entire trajectory of scientific publications collected. In addition, the leading role of Spain, as the country with the highest scientific production on the subject, should be emphasized. Although there are detractors of the application of gamified experiences in the university classroom, most of the research analyzed defends their development by teachers trained in this type of practices, in which the student is the axis of his own learning and promoter of his own gamified proposals.