That's right, Fabricio. Gamification can be used encourage learners to engage with the Virtual Learning Environment. By designing your gamified elements appropriately, it may be possible to encourage particular types of engagement and discourage others. There might also be some useful information in the attached paper.

Conference Paper Play As You Learn: Gamification as a Technique for Motivating Learners

 it's right,The proper Gamification techniques will helps to increase the  active participants.It's a double edged sword,If you not properly applied the techniques it will affect the process were you  applied.

Fabrico:

Engagement theory is applied to gamification. The attached on flexible learning environments help to elaborate further on such type of learning of which gamification is a strand.

Best regards,

Debra 

Data Flexible Learning Environments-Theories-Trends-Issues

we have a chapter on this topic here>

http://flowleadership.org/our-new-book/

Thanks, I'm reading the answers and I will read the documents sent to me.

Best regards,

Fabrício

You are talking about two different things.

Engagement is a concept, something you can observe or generate. And you can look for engagement, or try to change the level/quality/form of engagement. Any theory about engagement is to help you observe (and understand what you see) or to help you draw expectations/ideas on how to act to change it. One such theory, for instance, if Flow theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29 but there are many others.

Gamification is a technique. As with any technique, you don't use it to observe or to draw expectations/ideas. You use it to change things, to create things. In the case of gamification, the ideal concept is rendering non-gameful activities as games. The full enchilada implies not just the mechanics (score, badges, missions, quests, tracking) but also the non-mechanical aspects: narrative, fantasy, etc. Normally, people only do a little bit of gamification, i.e., the mechanical aspects. That is a pity.

So how does it come together? In many ways.

Suppose you want to improve engagement with a task. You have many ways to do that, based on many theories. For instance, if you use the Communities of Practice as a theoretical framework, its perspective is focused on social engagement. That will lead you to think about methods to generate social engagement. If you consider gamification as one such method, you will try to render social interaction into a game, rewarding people for interaction, making interaction mean more (in terms of game narrative) than just points, making it part of a larger story and "character" progress, etc.

But now consider you use flow theory for engagement. Flow theory at its core is about keeping people in a "flow" path balancing Skill Level and Challenge level. You can use many methods for this, not game-related in the least (for instance, suppose you analyse workers' concentration and performance on a task, and use flow theory as a way to select which next paper/file to send them to analyse - that's not game-related). But suppose you use gamification as a method for this. This will lead you to think about trying to define tasks into difficulty (challenge) hierarchies, and player performance into skill levels, and try to fine tune when to move players between levels and which game levels (tasks) to assign.

So, for the same issue (improve engagement), different theories (communities of practive vs. flow) define what you are looking at and even the same method (gamification) can lead to completely different approaches, because of theory.

Virtual learning environments are simply the context for human activity where you apply the theory and the methods.

Leonel, your explanation was very enlightening for my understanding in this subject. I'm investigating aspects of engagement, but I found many references related to gamification, so I made this question.

Thank you, I will investigate further on the flow theory.

Fabricio, the attached article aims to refine the concept of engagement. Many practitioners and researchers mention engagement but few specify what they mean by engagement.

I hope this will help you.

Best,

Patrice

Article Defining Engagement and Characterizing Engaged-Behaviors in ...

After accommodating the responses, I was reading a paper (in attached) and I believe is relevant to this discussion, so I leave as a suggestion.

Karl M. Kapp. "Convergence of Gamification and Virtual Worlds". Journal of Virtual Studies. V. 7, N. 1. 2016.

http://ejournal.urockcliffe.com/index.php/jovs/issue/view/10