EVALUATION OF THE BENEFITS FOR STUDENTS OF A GAMIFICATION EXPERIENCE AS A LEARNING SCENARIO IN A HIGHER EDUCATION E-LEARNING COURSE

The new global scenarios in the teaching-learning model of higher education have driven a substantial disruption in university teaching methodologies. This disruption has privileged significant strategies that encourage more active, reflective and autonomous attitudes and behaviors in students of modern society. Since 2011, the use of gamified tools applied to the educational context has become more relevant. Gamification is understood as the use of elements of the game in non-playful contexts, to influence the behavior and attitudes of the participant based on the stimulation of their motivation. This is particularly favorable in the educational field, because the application of games' resources (mechanical, dynamic, design, etc.) to positively modify the student's behavior, normally obtains positive results that correspond to the motivation of the learning strategy employed. In this work, the benefits are evaluated, from the perspective of the students, of the implementation of an e-learning course for higher education, as a gamified learning scenario. These benefits were measured in terms of Usability, defined as the extent to which a user can complete a task using a tool in an effective, efficient and satisfactory manner and, in terms of the theory of Cognitive Load, which describes how a user filters, processes, stores and retrieves information necessary for decision making. The evaluation showed that cognitive load indexers have a positive impact on satisfactory learning in those students who use gamified tools as a learning scenario. On the other hand, it was shown that a learning scenario based on gamification shows better usability than a traditional learning scenario.