Gamification For Learning

Yesterday's post on the gamification of an open government data portal was very interesting. I discovered that the term gamification is also used in connection with training/learning. Gaming concepts are also used to make learning fun and increase student engagement.

I have some experience using games for learning. During my MS in Finance program, one of my professors used a kind of simulation game to teach us corporate finance concepts. He wrote a computer program to simulate what would occur if the student's target values (for P/E ratio and so on) were put into practice. For my personal benefit, I used a stock simulation game to experiment with the stock market (example: https://www.stocktrak.com/).

I really do believe simulation games are very helpful. I was surprised to read in the following research paper that there is emerging research work arguing that gamification is not effective (the paper did not support this conclusion, however).

Paper: Exploring the impact of gamification on student engagement and involvement with e-learning systems
By: Imed Bouchrika, Nouzha Harrati, Vanissa Wanick & Gary Wills
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10494820.2019.1623267

Maybe more attention needs to be paid to the design of game-based tools and applications. Simulation games or simulations are useful for decision-making.

I recently updated the decision-making section of my LinkedIn research profile. Here is what it looks like now:

Cross-Disciplinary Research

I found a great editorial on how to undertake great cross-disciplinary research:

How to undertake great cross-disciplinary research
By: Adam Lindgreen, C. Anthony Di Benedetto, Roderick J. Brodie, Michelvan der Borgh
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019850120302583

I am all for cross-disciplinary research. In fact, it may be my "thing." I recall the different disciplines I touched on in my papers for the Research Methods course.
There was a paper on the decision to invest in people (human resources) vs. investing in technology to improve hand hygiene compliance. I discussed the impact of technology investment on performance or how technology may impact productivity and performance. This touches on technology as a factor of production (from economics). It also touches on finance since there is a rate of return of technology investments.
Another paper looked at how compensation of employees may affect the improvement of hand hygiene compliance and infection control. The relationship between compensation and performance was important. I used a lot of statistical analyses in the paper.

The blog for my Research Methods course that includes "under the hood" information on the papers is:
https://fmooresignatureassignment3.blogspot.com/

Social Media Research

Surprising findings from research I found today....

Paper:
Forecasting corporate credit ratings using big data from social media
By: Yuh-Jen Chen and Yuh-Min Chen
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417422012544

Finding:
"Social media represents an alternative method for financial institutions to determine corporate credit ratings. ... The experimental results of this research show that the accuracy of corporate credit rating prediction based on social media big data is higher than that of traditional financial report, corporate governance and macroeconomic indicators."

Just wow. Interesting to know that social media could provide results that are better than results using traditional financial statements/reports.
The study used social media data in Taiwan.
The paper assumes that individuals will provide their opinions on social media. 

In a statistics paper, I proposed research on the how well social media posts provide information on ethical culture and also predict business failure.