Gamifying Flipped Learning for Promoting Students' Online Participation

This paper proposes gamifying the online components of a flipped learning framework called Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride (FIBER), with the aim of increasing students' participation outside the classroom. FIBER is grounded in Stripling's six-phase social enquiry learning model and divides activities so that lower-order tasks such as remembering and understanding occur at home through online materials, while higher-order tasks such as analysis, evaluation, and creation take place in face-to-face sessions. The authors position flipped learning as a strategy that moves conventional lecture-style content outside the classroom to free in-class time for quality teacher-student and student-student interaction.

The gamification design draws on Lee et al.'s three-dimensional framework for gamified learning environments, which addresses cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. In the out-of-class phases (Connection, Comprehension, and Expression), students select avatars in a learning management system, earn "stars" for completing video-based materials, unlock subsequent content, and track progress on a dynamically updated leaderboard. Phases also incorporate feelings of success and failure, as well as collaborative and competitive social interaction, such as group argument construction on controversial societal issues and inter-group peer commenting on uploaded videos.

The paper is a proposal and conceptual design rather than an empirical study, so it reports no experimental results, sample sizes, or outcome statistics. Its scope is secondary-level social humanities education, with the framework situated within Hong Kong higher and secondary education contexts. The authors outline planned future work: an experimental comparison of gamified FIBER (g-FIBER) against the original FIBER, involving students of differing academic achievement levels, with knowledge acquisition as the primary measured outcome.