A systematic literature review on learning analytics for serious games

Abstract

Serious games (SGs) intend to educate, train and inform other than entertain. SGs’ engaging, goal-oriented nature encourages students to improve while playing. Although SGs have been increasingly adopted as a useful supplementary tool to the teaching and learning process, there are educational issues such as: a lack of understanding of how the students interact with the games, how the learning process actually occurs and therefore teacher's mistrust to use SGs as an assessment tool. Learning analytics (LA) is a solution to these issues as it infers knowledge about the effectiveness of the educational process. LA is a powerful technology which analyzes player’s interaction in concerns with educational content. In order to apply LA there are three necessary steps: tracing the player's generated data while s/he is playing the game, analyzing the collected data and finally visualizing the results. The interactive nature of SGs facilitates the application of LA but data collected suffers from standardization problems as the generated data vary in range. This study presents results of a systematic literature review on learning analytics for serious games: including uses of learning analytics in serious games, learning analytics steps, methodologies and existing tools for incorporating learning analytics in serious games, barriers and open research questions.