A Comparative Evaluation of the Effect of Social Comparison, Competition, and Social Learning in Persuasive Technology on Learning

The design of successful online learning systems that attract and sustain students’ active engagement with their learning activities remains an open question. With the rapid adoption of online learning systems (including learning management systems) due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a need to ensure that the systems’ design can encourage and sustain students to actively use them to achieve the required learning objectives. We argue that it is possible to incorporate socially-oriented persuasive strategies in the design of online learning systems to support students’ engagement and improve learning outcomes. We integrated three socially-oriented persuasive strategies (upward social comparison, social learning and competition) with a learning management system used in a university course. The strategies were implemented as social visualizations, and we explored their influence on 628 students’ access to learning materials. We found that the three persuasive strategies implemented as social visualizations encouraged students to access more frequently the learning materials, and this increase in frequency correlated positively with their academic performance (final grade in a course). Our results can help designers of online learning systems to improve the efficacy of their systems.