UNEDTrivialaprendiendo historia económica mediante un juego de preguntas y respuestas

Résumé

Previous research in Educational Psychology has showed the positive results for students’ engagement and learning of, on the one hand, the so-called Testing effect, or answering questions after study sessions; and, on the other hand, Spaced education, meaning spaced repetition of the same questions at specific intervals, which increases long-term retention. Taking this into account, online and mobile tools suitable to promote learning by testing thanks to automatic continuous formative-feedback, would be very helpful in massive distance education universities. With this aim, and based on previous experiences in UNED (Santamaría, Sánchez-Elvira, Hernández y Amor, 2016), a new Moodle activity, UNEDTrivial, was designed and developed by our team in the context of a Master Thesis. UNEDTrivial is an activity plugin of Moodle, available at Moodle official plug-in repository1, allowing any teacher to create spaced tests for any subject. Participants enrolled in any UNEDTrivial receive a daily email with the questions they have to answer. Thanks to the feedback provided in each response attempt,students build their knowledge in a guided and progressive way, correcting failures and reinforcing successes. Those questions wrongly answered are automatically sent again within the delay period of time established by the instructor, to check the knowledge acquisition and increase longterm retention. UNEDTrivial offers a complete learning analytics information from which teachers can track the progress of their students and send them emails, if necessary. Furthermore, UNEDTrivial uses gamification tools to increase student engagement such as a leaderboard, being compatible with Moodle badges. In this communication, UNEDTrivial will be presented, as well as the first results after have been applied in an undergraduate course on Economic History.