Enhancing collaborative learning in higher education online courses through a mobile game app

In recent years, institutions of higher education have been using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an alternative to enhance and innovate traditional classroom practices. One of the approaches to this type of innovation consists of using MOOC platforms to develop online courses exclusively for their students. They are known as SPOC (Small Private Online Courses), distance-learning courses that provide access to knowledge online to smaller groups of students with a well defined profile. However, despite being robust platforms that support large volumes of data and visits, these are limited in the development of certain traditional class activities. Specifically, the existing platforms lack tools to facilitate group work. To address this problem, this article presents MyMOOCSpace, a game-based mobile application that offers an opportunity to scaffold the collaborative learning processes of MOOC platforms. MyMOOCSpace was developed with CSCL and game dynamics in mind. To assess this application and demonstrate its use, a case study of 25 students is presented. The results show that MyMOOCSpace increases the interaction among groups of SPOC participants.