Enhancing Engagement in a Learning Management System through a Raffle Ticket System

Learning management systems (LMS) are essential components of courses, yet student engagement on these platforms remains a significant challenge. Traditionally, grades have been used to incentivize student engagement, but this approach comes with drawbacks. In this paper, we explored an alternative form of incentivization, gamification, that has gained traction in higher education. We implemented a gamified raffle ticket system aimed at enhancing asynchronous engagement with our LMS, Microsoft Teams, in a third-year undergraduate elective health sciences course during the fall 2023 semester. We defined engagement as students’ voluntary participation and interaction in LMS-related activities. Students earned raffle tickets for various participatory activities using the LMS—including making a post, replying to a thread, and reacting to posts—which were later entered into a drawing for prizes. Student participation in these activities was tallied and used as quantitative data of engagement. We recorded engagement metrics for three different semesters of the same course: fall 2023 in which the raffle ticket system was implemented; and fall 2021 and fall 2022 before the implementation of the raffle ticket system. Results indicated a substantial increase in engagement metrics following the raffle ticket system’s introduction. Our findings suggest that the gamified raffle ticket system effectively incentivized student engagement, fostering a more interactive and supportive online learning community in the LMS. Thus, this paper offers a framework for educators who are looking to adopt a gamification strategy into their own courses to engage students to interact in an LMS.