Coursera Gamification Course Review

The Gamification course on Cousera is just wrapping up, so it’s about time for another MOOC review.


Gamification provides an overview of using game elements in non-game contexts. The primary purpose of gamification is to give people extra encouragement to do something that they may not be adequately motivated to do on their own. For instance, a business that wants to improve the overall health of its employees to reduce health care costs might introduce a gamified system to encourage workers to exercise. Similarly, a company with a web application might introduce game elements like points and badges and community interaction to encourage activity on the app.


The course does a good job summarizing the basics of gamification, such as how gamification can be useful, how gamification differs from games, elements of gamified systems, motivation and psychology of players and limits to gamification. It also lays out a basic design framework for creating gamified systems, covers basic design choices, risks and possible legal concerns.


Gamification is an easy, fun course, that benefits from quality instruction and an interesting topic. You’ll come away from this course with a solid understanding of what gamification is, how it can be employed and how to think about designing gamified systems. Afterward, you’ll probably start recognizing gamification all around you.


On the downside, the material does not get particularly deep. Oftentimes the class feels like it is providing structure to the ideas that you probably already have about games and gamification, rather than presenting new insights. The course focuses a lot on the organization and formalization of the knowledge and intuitions you probably already have. This is not necessarily a bad thing, there just aren’t’ any “Aha” moments where you learn something particularly insightful that changes your way of thinking. Your experience may vary.


Another quibble I had with the course is that 35% of the grade is based on peer assessed writing assignments. Students seemed to stray from using the rubric and instead assigned grades based on their own subjective opinions of whether they liked your ideas or not.


Overall, this is a good course, but if you want a certificate you should plan to score 90% or more on all the quizzes and the exam just to be safe.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars: Very Good.