Education for Sustainable Development in a Gamified Online Learning Environment

Resumen

The COVID-19 health crisis has highlighted the need to incorporate active learningmethodologies in higher education that allow the achievement of meaningful learning even whenteaching is entirely online. In the framework of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable DevelopmentGoals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations Member States in 2015 (Colglazier, 2015), theinnovative learning project presented here seeks to bring students of economics and business closerto sustainable strategic decision-making through gamification and role playing. For this purpose,students are introduced to the 2030 Agenda and the SGDs through the digital tool Mentimeter. Theaim is to familiarize students with the SDGs, bringing them closer to the ethical dilemmas they willhave to face in their corporate role, as well as providing them with useful tools to effectivelycommunicate their ideas, develop their critical judgment and learn to work under pressure.This innovation involves gamification, i.e., the use of game elements such as competition (see,Sendra-Pons et al., 2020, 2021), as well as role-playing, whereby students must act according to apredetermined profile that implies specific action restrictions (Pinar-García and Sendra-Pons, 2021).Thus, after obtaining the students feedback through Mentimeter, students are divided into groups ofsix, each group being a company. Subgroups of two students are then formed, each representing adepartment –i.e., marketing, finance, or human resources. They are then provided with an email fromthe CEO of the company with several challenges related to sustainability. In addition, they are givena set of instructions regarding their role, which they must follow throughout the activity. This strategic decision-making process has three main stages. In the first stage, students makedecisions within each department. Once the solution to the problem has been proposed at thedepartmental level, the entire company meets, trying to reach a consensus on a single solution. Itshould be noted that the students involved are divided into managers and assistants, hence withdifferent hierarchies, what makes the role playing more interesting. The companies that succeed inadopting a single solution, by reaching a consensus among the different departments, receive a bonusin terms of game points. Finally, the solutions are presented in elevator pitch format and all thestudents assign the game points they consider to each proposal out of a total of one hundred points,simulating the market’s reaction to the different initiatives.Ultimately, this learning experience, in which more than 150 students participated, has (1)increased student satisfaction levels with online teaching (participants rated their satisfaction with thesession as 4.3 out of 5) and (2) generated higher levels of interaction with students throughMentimeter and, among students, through role-playing and cooperative work. In addition, it hasallowed (3) developing materials to deliver the session online, even when health conditions allowdoing it in person, and (4) corroborating that it is possible to generate a meaningful learningexperience online through cooperative work (participants rated on average 4.5 out of 5 that they “feltable to incorporate the SDGs in their future business projects”).