The use of gamification as a teaching methodology in a MOOC about the strategic energy reform in México

The irruption of online programs in education such as MOOCs is push-ing educators to promote new ways of teaching to engage students. Nonetheless, most higher education teachers are not trained in the practices of e-learning. In this paper, we study the effects of gamification to see whether it better promotes learning. Over 6,000 participants enrolled in the MOOC entitled “Conventional and green energy sources” and 1,016 eventually completed it. Main results indi-cate that for all participants’ profiles (i.e., gender, age, and educational level) the completion of a gamification challenge at the end of the course favored their learning as shown in a final test scores. This lead us to think that gamification improves students’ performance in online teaching. However, there are technical limitations associated to the courses platforms that need to be solved to be able to use non-traditional learning approaches.