MoodleStories: Improving Learner Motivation Through Interactive

Visual Stories

Pedro H. Sanvido and Isabel H. Manssour

School of Technology, Pontiﬁcal Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Keywords:

Interactive Narratives, Virtual Learning Environments, Learning Motivation, Self-Regulated Learning.

Abstract:

As courses ministered in online environments continue to grow in size and interest, concerns regarding poor

academic outcomes and low completion rates remain true. We have developed MoodleStories, a digital

storytelling-based solution for improving learning motivation and engagement to compensate for these short-

comings. MoodleStories was developed as an authorship tool available on the Moodle platform. We have

devised a Python programming course accompanied by an interactive and thematic comic story about the

course. Six participants were interviewed by the end of the course as a validation instrument. Following the

interview study, participants showed increased awareness of the activities that dictated story progression and

were eager to use MoodleStories in future learning contexts. We argue that MoodleStories expands the design

scope and possibilities in applying nonlinear narratives in learning contexts and thus enables the creation of

engaging experiences that promote motivation and foster active involvement with coursework.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the last years, the growth presented by virtual learn-

ing environments (VLEs) seems to conﬁrm their role

as one of the major players in global learning. With

their creed of open access, initiatives such as MOOCs

have garnered interest from students, as the courses

provide ﬂexibility and learning opportunities beyond

ﬁnancial and spatial barriers. Nowadays, learners

from all over the world can freely enroll in various

courses (Qu and Chen, 2015). The growing relevance

of MOOCs has also prompted discussion over vari-

ous topics, such as the beneﬁts it provides and the

concerns expressed about those platforms. A recur-

rent discussed subject is the aspect of retention rates;

despite the high number of enrollments, only a small

proportion of the students usually manage to gradu-

ate (Onah et al., 2014).

Many authors attribute this phenomenon to the

challenges in which learners must independently

regulate their learning process. Unlike class-

room lectures that follow a pre-established sched-

ule, courses ministered in VLEs require that stu-

dents manage coursework independently. (Lajoie and

Azevedo, 2006) found that VLE students often strug-

gle with self-assessment and time management re-

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9446-6757

garding course activities. This is emphasized by the

research suggesting that successfully graduating in

MOOC courses requires learners to be constantly self-

assessing. Else, it is common for students to fall into

patterns of failing behavior (Hew and Cheung, 2014).

Such challenges have sparked several research

that attempts to close this gap in online learning: solu-

tions that employ different mechanisms, as peer com-

parisons, goal-setting, and gamiﬁed systems, arose to

promote self-regulatory behavior and aid learners in

the achievement of their learning goals. We focus

on using digital storytelling techniques for that pur-

pose, which (Benmayor, 2008) argues is a tool that

empowers students intellectually, culturally, and cre-

atively. Other authors have veriﬁed that the applica-

tion of digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool is tied

to enhancing learner motivation and can thus improve

aspects such as retention rates in MOOCs (Chothia

et al., 2017; Thirouard et al., 2019).

One format for designing narratives is the so-

called “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) story,

in which readers can interact directly with the narra-

tive through choices that can have different outcomes

and ramiﬁcations (Korber and Shepherd, 2019).

These stories put readers in the protagonist’s shoes,

providing them with control over the story. CYOA

narratives have been previously adapted and used

in learning scenarios for improved learner motiva-

Sanvido, P. and Manssour, I.

MoodleStories: Improving Learner Motivation Through Interactive Visual Stories.

DOI: 10.5220/0011842000003470

In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2023) - Volume 1, pages 201-208

ISBN: 978-989-758-641-5; ISSN: 2184-5026

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

201

tion and engagement (Chothia et al., 2017; Hand

and Varan, 2008). This motivated the conception of

MoodleStories, an integrated authoring tool for in-

teractive narratives in Moodle. We propose an ap-

proach to narrative interactivity that takes advantage

of learner-generated data, such as their activities and

interactions in the online environment. Interactivity

and “choice” are modeled through how learners inter-

act with coursework, such that the obtained grade in

an assignment or the resource accessed can become

the driving point for narrative branching and progres-

sion.

The stories are presented to the learner through

comic-style images displayed directly in the Moodle

interface. As the course progresses according to the

narrative, learners may receive different panels ac-

cording to the narrative pathways deﬁned by the au-

thor. We argue that MoodleStories operates at the in-

tersection between narrative-based learning enhance-

ment and gamiﬁcation, a commonly used mechanism

to promote increased participation, motivation, and

commitment in online learning (Morales et al., 2016).

To validate MoodleStories, we worked on creating

a comics-based nonlinear story and implemented it in

a self-ran programming course in Moodle. The story

puts the learner as the main character, from which

different endings can be reached based on a set of

graded activities that drive story progression. We con-

ducted interviews with the course participants to eval-

uate their learning experiences mediated by the narra-

tive. Most showed higher awareness and care when

engaging in activities that would drive story progres-

sion, and the element of novelty drove increased mo-

tivation and eagerness to engage with coursework.

The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-

lows. We begin by presenting some of the related lit-

erature in Section 2. We then detail the workings and

implementation process of the MoodleStories tool in

Section 3. Next, Section 4 details the online course

and interview study employed for the validation of

MoodleStories. Section 5 discusses the contributions,

limitations, and opportunities for future research. Fi-

nally, in Section 6 we conclude this work.

2 RELATED WORK

Many researchers have brought concepts related to

storytelling to storytelling in a variety of learning con-

texts. This section describes some of the research that

makes use of these concepts, zooming in on the appli-

cation of interactive narratives in learning. As such,

we brieﬂy detail some of the works we considered to

be more closely related to this work.

First, (Dincelli and Chengalur-Smith, 2019) de-

veloped a visual CYOA narrative based on comics for

teaching and training in cybersecurity education. The

approach proposes a contextualized storyline for cy-

bersecurity in which learners can alter the course of

the story at speciﬁc decision points. On one occa-

sion, the readers are asked whether they would like to

read or not the updated privacy policy of an applica-

tion, which has developments and repercussions in the

story. CYOA narratives were also used for learning

in the cybersecurity ﬁelds, as (Chothia et al., 2017)

brought a CYOA narrative with many elements inside

a cybersecurity course. Learners are put in the shoes

of a new cybersecurity employee inside the story,

which needs to complete various tasks and are given

choices to progress the story. Each option can lead

to the discovery and new story developments. The

authors performed qualitative and quantitative eval-

uations, and the story’s application showed positive

results in engagement and motivation.

(Bechkoff, 2019) explores the relationship be-

tween gamiﬁcation and CYOA narrative in experi-

mental research proposing an approach of a game tied

with a non-linear narrative for marketing education.

The study had students engage in a game based on

mystery riddles and interactive answers with branch-

ing paths. The work was evaluated, showing in-

creased student engagement and overall performance.

The observed literature indicates that enhanc-

ing learner motivation and engagement are some of

the prevalent reasons for implementing interactive

narrative-based approaches in educational contexts.

There are parallels to be drawn on the relationship

between learner engagement and interaction in nar-

ratives, which empowers learners with agency and

control over stories, which can incite more proac-

tive behavior. The support and promotion of proac-

tive learner behavior can positively impact learning

engagement, as it can, e.g., result in learners engag-

ing with coursework more often on their own accord.

Proactive behavior is one of the components in at-

taining higher self-regulated learning (SRL) behav-

ior (Zimmerman, 2008), which is an important factor

in achieving higher academic outcomes.

3 MoodleStories PLUGIN

MoodleStories is a plugin developed for the Moodle

learning environment, which enables the creation, de-

sign, and presentation of interactive visual narratives.

We contextualize MoodleStories as an authorship tool

for creating and viewing interactive, nonlinear visual

stories integrated with the Moodle environment. Its

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

202

main component is the Interactive Narrative Creator, a

tool that streamlines the process of conceiving, plan-

ning, and quickly deploying CYOA-style narratives

directly from the Moodle environment. As opposed to

having the learner interact directly with the narrative,

such as making choices from a protagonist’s point-of-

view, the approach proposed by MoodleStories mod-

els the interaction as the ways in which a learner can

interact with the course. This can include the whole

scope of activity tracking covered by the Moodle en-

vironment, enabling varied and distinct possibilities

for story progression and narrative design. What score

has a learner obtained in this test? How many posts

have they made on the forums? Was this resource

downloaded? Questions such as these can become

the driving points for story progression in CYOA nar-

ratives. This approach extends the design scope for

which CYOA narratives can be applied to learning

contexts and provides resources to promote student

engagement and motivation.

3.1 Interactive Narrative Creator

Figure 1: Main interface of the interactive narrative creator:

canvas area (a), detail menu (b), and canvas toolbar (c).

The interactive narrative creator is a tool for creat-

ing interactive visual narratives in Moodle. Figure 1

presents the main interface. Item (a) denotes the can-

vas element. The canvas functions as a “drawing

board” for designing and laying down the structure

for an interactive narrative. The narrative designer

can create story nodes and connections onto the can-

vas, drag, and interact freely with these objects. The

canvas toolbar in item (c) provides buttons for creat-

ing story nodes, connections and zooming in and out

of objects. Lastly, in item (b), we can see the detail

menu, which displays all the data attributes associated

with the selected object. It is through the detail menu

that users are expected to create and edit customizable

attributes, which lay the foundation for narrative pro-

gression, design, and deployment. Interactive visual

narratives are then conceived through the relationship

drawn by the detail menu and canvas objects.

3.1.1 The Story Node Object

Story nodes are the most fundamental elements in the

modeling of MoodleStories. They abstract the con-

cept of a continuous segment of a given narrative from

beginning to end, functioning as ﬂexible containers

for story pathways, enabling systematic ramiﬁcations

and intersections among segments of the narrative.

The story node object carries various data attributes,

but the most important structure it carries is the set of

panels associated with it. Each story node will nec-

essarily have one or more panels. This set of panels

is expected to be part of a continuous segment of a

narrative, conveying the visual data of each panel and

the order in which they appear in the story. Again,

each of the circles-shaped objects in Figure 1 repre-

sent distinct story nodes in MoodleStories, along with

the detail menu, which displays and enables the edit-

ing of associated data. Below we list and brieﬂy ex-

plain each data attribute associated with them:

• Comic panel ﬁles: a set with one or more ordered

image ﬁles corresponding to a continuous narra-

tive segment.

• Name: story node objects can be named to facili-

tate narrative planning and organization.

• Color: story node objects can be customized with

different colors for color-coding organization.

• Connections: narrative progression is made

through the use of connections, and subsequently,

conditionals. Section 3.1.2 explains the use of

connections in detail.

3.1.2 Connections, Conditions, and Variables

The creation of connections among story nodes is

the main mechanism behind story advancement in

MoodleStories. Connections follow a format charac-

terized by A → B, with origin and target nodes com-

manding story advancements. For example, in Fig-

ure 1, we have the node Pip

Intro connected to the

nodes W1 and W2. This structure alludes to previ-

ously seen representations of CYOA narratives in lit-

erature (Chothia et al., 2017; Dincelli and Chengalur-

Smith, 2019).

MoodleStories: Improving Learner Motivation Through Interactive Visual Stories

203

Story progression is achieved by satisfying the

conditions contemplated by each connection originat-

ing from the current story node. While this approach

can effectively model interactivity as in-course activ-

ities, situations in which multiple conditions are sat-

isﬁed among different node-to-node connections must

be handled properly, as they are otherwise conﬂicting.

To address these issues, MoodleStories determines

the story progression based on the order in which the

connections are speciﬁed in the interface. Whenever

new connections are created, they are automatically

placed below the connections made before them. This

functions as a priority list for the order in which these

conditions must be tested for story progression.

Once the narrative structure is completed, it can

then be deployed to a suitable course. Once de-

ployed, a simple web component that allows the view-

ing of panels back and forth is displayed in the course

header. As such, every learner is presented with their

own individual view of the narrative.

4 MoodleStories VALIDATION

We evaluated the learning experience mediated by an

interactive visual narrative built in MoodleStories by

creating an online course. We collaborated with an

artist to integrate the narrative into the course, then re-

cruited participants to take part. Interviews were con-

ducted to evaluate the impact of the narrative on the

learners’ experiences. We explored the different per-

spectives, experiences, and opinions of the learners in

the interviews. In the following sections, we explain

the tasks associated with the validation process.

4.1 Population and Recruitment

Regarding the population, we had the volunteers ad-

here to inclusion and exclusion criteria. We deter-

mined the criteria based on ethical concerns, goals of

the validation, and coursework contents. Thus, the

inclusion criteria were participants who had already

taken at least one distance education course and had

little or no experience with Python programming, as

the course’s content is introductory. Experience with

VLEs was required to ensure the participants did not

have problems navigating the course’s content. Ex-

clusion criteria were participants under 18 years of

age or with physical or cognitive impairments.

Considering the qualitative character of the anal-

ysis stage of the interviews, we envisioned a limited

sample size. (Boyce and Neale, 2006) argue that a

smaller subset of respondents is suitable for in-depth

interviews, as it enables the deeper exploration of

their perspectives for a given subjective. Therefore,

we planned that the online course, and consequently

the interviews, would be conducted with a range of

four to eight participants. The recruitment process

was done through the social network site Twitter

Once the volunteers manifested interest in partici-

pating, they were reached through direct messaging.

At the time of contact, the volunteers were handed

the consent form for participating in the study, and

upon agreement, the participants were considered to

be included in the research. The recruitment process

lasted eight days, from which we obtained eight vol-

unteers. Each participant engaged with coursework

asynchronously, with course completion ranging from

8 to 41 days. In total, 6 out of the 8 participants com-

pleted the course.

4.2 Online Course Details

Since MoodleStories was designed to deploy stories

in contexts of distance education ministered in Moo-

dle, it was necessary to create a suitable scenario

for conducting this validation. For this, we ﬁrst fol-

lowed the protocol of the Ethics and Research Com-

mittee

Then, we planned and formulated the course

contents, including lectures, graded activities, and ex-

ercises. To reduce the time consumption associated

with these tasks, we used the Moodle collection of

open courses available for download. It is necessary

to select a course subject within our skillsets to exer-

cise the instructor role, as the learners may require as-

sistance with coursework. Thus, we found the course

“Python for Beginners 1 - Python Language Basics”

in the Moodle Course Directory

suitable. The ma-

terials were uploaded to our own Moodle instance by

using the “Import Course”

function and then trans-

lated and adapted to Brazilian Portuguese.

4.3 Projected Story

We sought to evaluate the impact and repercussions

of an interactive story projected with MoodleStories

in an online course setting. Thus, we formulated an

interactive narrative in MoodleStories. We count on

the collaboration of the graphic designer and illus-

trator Alexandria Troup to bring about the illustra-

tions comic panels of the projected narrative. The

https://www.twitter.com

Documentation available at http://plataformabrasil.

saude.gov.br/login.jsf with the CAAE number

22641819.8.0000.5336.

https://moodle.net/resource/

d9h0i4td3332-python-for-beginners

https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Upload courses

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

204

concepts associated with MoodleStories, the tool it-

self, and the online course contents were introduced

and explained to the illustrator. The creation of the

story was a joint effort that involved conceptualizing

the narrative, drawing the panels, and structuring the

narrative in MoodleStories. Given our scenario, mo-

tivations, and objectives, we worked from within the

following constraints when designing the story:

• The CYOA narrative pathways should be fairly

simple to understand, ensuring participants unfa-

miliar with MoodleStories or CYOA-style narra-

tives can understand the story’s progression and

the story-wise implications regarding the results

obtained in coursework activities.

• The story must match the course contents, i.e., it

needs to be related to the Python programming

language, and the concepts throughout the course

must appear in the story to reinforce the relation-

ship between the story and the course’s activities.

• Game-like systems should be incorporated into

the interactive narrative to address the enhance-

ment of learner motivation.

Thus, we created the comic story “The Adventures

of Pip in the World of Python”. The story puts the

learner as our protagonist, Pip. Pip’s friend, Panda, is

taken away by the evil Python snake. Pip goes on a

journey through the world of Python to rescue Panda.

Our three characters are named after Python themes:

Pip as a reference to the package manager

; Pandas

being a popular data analysis library

; Python being

the snake character itself. The choice of introducing

Python themes to the story was made to familiarize

learners with concepts surrounding the subject and

reinforce the relationship between the story and the

coursework.

The story’s progression is centered around Pip ad-

vancing through the world of Python and conquering

different enemies. The comic panels draw inspiration

from video games, as the classic platforming video

game Super Mario Bros. played a role in the visual

presentation of the comics. The story plays on the

abstraction of each course lesson corresponding to a

new stage, which is done by matching the enemy de-

sign to the subjects of the scheduled lesson. For ex-

ample, when the next lesson is integer data types, Pip

faces number-shaped enemies. This dynamic involv-

ing game-like stages is presented by the panels de-

picted in Figures 2, 3, and 4.

The interactivity of the story is drawn by the re-

lationship between the learner’s performance in the

https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/

installing-packages/

https://pandas.pydata.org/

Figure 2: Introductory comic panel for a given lesson.

course and each lesson’s contents, which correspond

to each “level” in the story. Each unit is followed by

a graded quiz, the results of which will determine the

success of the story (good, average, failure). Figure 3

shows varying degrees of success for the panels cor-

responding to a given course unit. This nods to the

idea of bringing game-like constructs into the inter-

active story. Different outcomes are possible, such

as Pip obtaining a moderate level of success but be-

ing unable to collect the coins, or Pip being unable to

reach the proposed goal. For every course unit, pan-

els will inform the learners of their current level of

performance.

Figure 3: Panel depicting success to clear a lesson module.

The measured success in each level directly inﬂu-

ences the story’s outcome, which serves as the pri-

mary motivation for the learner to reach a good end-

ing for the story. In the story, Pip sets out on a quest

to save Panda, whose outcome is determined by the

overall grading in the course. Positive learning out-

comes are closed with the happy ending, in which

Pip successfully saves Panda as depicted in Figure 4.

When the learner fails to achieve the expected grades,

Pip is defeated by the snake and fails to save Panda.

MoodleStories: Improving Learner Motivation Through Interactive Visual Stories

205

Figure 4: One of the possible story endings, in which Pip

defeats the snake and saves their friend.

4.4 Interview Study

We interviewed each learner who participated in the

study to explore their perspectives, experiences, and

thoughts. (Boyce and Neale, 2006) remark that in-

depth interviews are “useful when you want detailed

information about a person’s thoughts and behaviors

or want to explore new issues in depth”. We elabo-

rated a semi-structured questionnaire to guide the in-

terview process as a qualitative data collection instru-

ment. The questions do not target any aspects related

to coursework content and are self-contained to the

interactions and experiences faced by learners medi-

ated by the interactive narrative. The questions were

open-ended to encourage learners to elaborate on their

thoughts and to capture the participant’s proﬁle.

Following course completion, we scheduled the

interviews with the participants. Each was inter-

viewed without interruption, following the same en-

vironment: face-to-face online conversations through

video-conference software for 20 to 45 minutes. The

participants were reminded of several aspects out-

lined in the consent form, such as the interview au-

dio recording. The interviews were conducted with a

semi-structured script of 15 questions organized into

two parts, six questions for capturing the participant’s

proﬁles and nine to evaluate the impact of the interac-

tive visual narrative on their learning experiences.

4.4.1 Participants Proﬁle

All participants stayed in the range of 20 to 31 years

old and had at least ﬁnished high school. They were

either enrolled in undergraduate programs at the mo-

ment of the interview or had concluded undergradu-

ate. None of the participants were currently enrolled

in graduate programs or had planned to enroll in them.

Questions about their experience with distance

learning revealed interesting points regarding the par-

ticipants. For the most part, participants were already

familiar with the Moodle platform. Some participants

had experiences with failing or giving up on online

courses, for which each had attributed different rea-

sons for the failure, such as lack of time, interest, pres-

sure, and coursework beyond the level of understand-

ing. A handful of participants had also not failed an

online course, and some spontaneously expressed that

they had only come in contact with distance learning

from within the context of their institutions, having

little or no experience with broader MOOC scenarios.

4.4.2 Learning Experience with MoodleStories

The second segment of the interview covered issues

related to MoodleStories to capture overall thoughts

surrounding motivation and engagement, possible

problems, and impact on their learning experiences.

As speciﬁed by (Boyce and Neale, 2006), we looked

for patterns and themes among the participants while

paying attention to answers given spontaneously or

with enthusiasm to explore the many different per-

spectives provided throughout the interview process.

Five out of six participants experienced “The

Adventures of Pip in the World of Python” and

MoodleStories positively. When asked about the ef-

fect of the story on their learning, they reported emo-

tional involvement, which led to increased effort in

quiz activities. Participants expressed desire to save

the Panda character, demonstrating the story’s posi-

tive impact on their course experience. However, par-

ticipants were more engaged only in activities that im-

mediately impacted the story. Other activities, such

as posting questions in forums and paying more at-

tention to the lectures were not mentioned. The pat-

terns observed reveal that learners showed emotion

and involvement when presented with the story ob-

jective, hinting at the importance of having common

goals learners can work towards narrative-wise. Fur-

thermore, learners demonstrated awareness and com-

prehension of the primary mechanism for moving

the story forward, the interaction with coursework.

However, the observed higher engagement was se-

lective concerning the activities contemplated as nar-

rative pathways. While these ﬁndings hint at the

MoodleStories approach to interaction in the narra-

tives positively fostering higher engagement, it also

highlights caveats in narrative design for this ap-

proach to be explored.

When asked about motivation, four participants

described how the presence of the story affected how

they engaged with the course. One participant said

that novelty kept them more interested and motivated

to engage with coursework. As the comic panels

were added incrementally following activity comple-

tion, they expressed eagerness to engage and progress

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

206

more quickly with the coursework to visualize the

new comic panels sooner. The narrative granted a

game-like element to the online course, which cor-

roborates with some viewpoints found in research that

argue interactive narratives bring an element of gami-

ﬁcation to the courses (Chothia et al., 2017).

Regarding the approach used for narrative inter-

activity, all participants understood the mechanism.

However, a few concerns were voiced throughout the

interview. While the means for story progression

were described as “easy to understand”, further in-

quiring showed the mechanism was not quite as clear

as intended. Two participants claimed to rely on fo-

rum explanations and previous direct messaging to

understand how to interact and progress in the story,

as just the initial story prompt does not immediately

clarify how to interact with the story. This suggests

a need for a tutorial or explanatory notes to support

understanding the workings behind each narrative.

All participants considered the presented comic

to be of appropriate length for the course size. The

narrative was designed with the course contents in

mind, and the panels provided direct feedback to the

learners, informing them of the next activity. None

of the learners thought that the comic panels were

distracting or intrusive in the Moodle environment.

Two mentioned that the comic stories were short and

did not feature signiﬁcant amounts of reading. These

ﬁndings seem to reafﬁrm some arguments made by

(McCloud, 2006) regarding comics, as they enabled

quick reading and fast identiﬁcation with readers.

The participants reacted positively to the presence

of MoodleStories and would consider enrolling in

other courses employing interactive narratives. Three

remarked that they wished other online courses would

employ “fun” teaching metholodogies. Two partici-

pants were enthusiastic about implementing such nar-

ratives in future courses. One signiﬁcant takeaway

was that learners could interact and understand the

mechanism for story progression, albeit with guid-

ance, which validates one of the fundamental and

novel elements of MoodleStories.

5 DISCUSSION

This section discusses our main contributions and the

limitations of the proposed solutions and analysis and

enumerates the opportunities for future research.

5.1 Contributions

The conduction of research process has covered in-

teractive storytelling for motivation and engagement.

We summarize our research contributions in the de-

velopment of MoodleStories, and its validation with

“The Adventures of Pip in the World of Python” in an

online Python course.

MoodleStories presents a new way to create and

integrate interactive visual narratives in online Moo-

dle courses. We argue that the approach proposed

to interactivity should enable instructors to create

engaging learning experiences that foster motivation

and positive engagement with coursework. Integrat-

ing “The Adventures of Pip in the World of Python”

in an online programming course has allowed us to

look at the repercussions created by the interactive

narrative among six participants. The participants

showed emotional involvement with the story and

higher awareness when performing activities that di-

rectly impacted the narrative. The analysis of the in-

terviews also revealed some caveats in narrative de-

sign for MoodleStories, as participants commented,

e.g., on factors of narrative length and story prompts

as motivators. In this context, MoodleStories also

presents research opportunities in creating and in-

corporating these narratives. Next, we acknowledge

some of the limitations in this work and expand on

the possibilities for future work.

5.2 Limitations and Future Work

In its current form, MoodleStories enables the plan-

ning and projecting of interactive narratives with

functionalities offered by the node elements, path-

ways, and environment conditionals. However, it

does not eliminate the need for artistic skills to con-

ceive a narrative, which may often lie outside the

skills expected of an education professional. This lim-

itation may restrict the applicability of MoodleSto-

ries due to logistical and ﬁnancial hurdles. We see

two ways going forward with MoodleStories. First

is the elaboration and integration of a collaborative

comic story repository through which users could up-

load and share their creations, enabling other users to

download this creation and adjust the node conﬁgu-

ration, pathways, and conditions to suit their online

course. However, for broad adoption, the contents of

the uploaded stories would have to be in large part

“generic” (e.g., non-course speciﬁc), and there are

signiﬁcant challenges regarding organic growth of the

repository. Another possible way forward is imple-

menting a panel-creation interface with pre-made 3D

assets to streamline the tasks of panel creation. This

approach could be effective to lower the hurdle of the

skill necessary to create comic panels. Both proposed

approaches present feasible opportunities for the ad-

vancement of the MoodleStories tool.

MoodleStories: Improving Learner Motivation Through Interactive Visual Stories

207

Lastly, MoodleStories could beneﬁt from a larger-

scale quantative evaluation. MoodleStories could be

implemented for a subset of learners in a real-world

online course scenario while another group contin-

ues to operate without it. This experiment would en-

able us to compare the performance of both groups in

various aspects, such as academic achievement, time

spent, and amount of community interactions. Fur-

ther estimating the impact of MoodleStories on learn-

ing outcomes, student engagement, and learning mo-

tivation is an important step toward its broader appli-

cability and adoption in real-world scenarios. These

evaluations are to come in future work.

6 CONCLUSION

As online courses continue to grow in relevance and

interest, so does the demand for solutions that mit-

igate or improve certain aspects of online learning.

The research on SRL-based implementations contem-

plates a wide scope of learning’s cognitive, behav-

ioral, motivational, and emotional aspects. We use

interactive storytelling to develop MoodleStories, an

integrated tool for creating and viewing interactive,

nonlinear stories in Moodle. Our approach using ac-

tivity tracking data provided by the VLE brings the

question of learner engagement to the forefront and

presents opportunities to expand the design scope in

incorporating narratives in online courses. Through

the validation process, we could verify how learn-

ers reacted and interacted with the story in an online

course environment. This process helped reveal im-

portant details regarding how activities that conﬁgure

story progression are perceived differently, and brings

up questions such as how emotional involvement with

the stories can impact engagement with coursework.

These factors hint at how differences in narrative de-

sign can inﬂuence underlying aspects of the learning

process and highlight possible pathways in future re-

search on creating and integrating interactive narra-

tives in courses using MoodleStories.

REFERENCES

Bechkoff, J. (2019). Gamiﬁcation using a choose-your-

own-adventure type platform to augment learning and

facilitate student engagement in marketing educa-

tion. Journal for Advancement of Marketing Educa-

tion (JAME), 27(1).

Benmayor, R. (2008). Digital storytelling as a signature

pedagogy for the new humanities. Arts and Humani-

ties in Higher Education, 7(2):188–204.

Boyce, C. and Neale, P. (2006). Conducting in-depth in-

terviews: A guide for designing and conducting in-

depth interviews for evaluation input. Pathﬁnder In-

ternational, Boston.

Chothia, T., Holdcroft, S., Radu, A.-I., and Thomas, R. J.

(2017). Jail, hero or drug lord? turning a cyber secu-

rity course into an 11 week choose your own adven-

ture story. In 2017 USENIX Workshop on Advances

in Security Education (ASE 17), Vancouver. USENIX

Association.

Dincelli, E. and Chengalur-Smith, S. (2019). Choose your

own hacking adventure: Contextualized storytelling to

enhance security education and training. In Proceed-

ings of the 15th Symposium on Usable Privacy and

Security (SOUPS).

Hand, S. and Varan, D. (2008). Interactive narratives: Ex-

ploring the links between empathy, interactivity and

structure. In Tscheligi, M., Obrist, M., and Lugmayr,

A., editors, Changing Television Environments, pages

11–19, Berlin. Springer Science and Business Media

LLC.

Hew, K. F. and Cheung, W. S. (2014). Students’ and instruc-

tors’ use of massive open online courses (MOOCs):

Motivations and challenges. Educational Research

Review, 12:45–58.

Korber, I. and Shepherd, J. (2019). Teaching the informa-

tion literacy framework. Reference Services Review,

47(4):461–475.

Lajoie, S. P. and Azevedo, R. (2006). Teaching and learn-

ing in technology-rich environments. In Handbook of

Educational Psychology, chapter 35. Routledge, Ox-

fordshire.

McCloud, S. (2006). Making comics: storytelling secrets

of comics, manga and graphic novels. Harper, New

York, 1st ed edition. OCLC: ocm71338724.

Morales, M., Amado-Salvatierra, H. R., Hern

andez, R.,

Pirker, J., and G

utl, C. (2016). A practical experi-

ence on the use of gamiﬁcation in MOOC courses as a

strategy to increase motivation. In Uden, L., Liberona,

D., and Feldmann, B., editors, Learning Technology

for Education in Cloud – The Changing Face of Edu-

cation, pages 139–149, Cham. Springer International

Publishing.

Onah, D. F., Sinclair, J., and Boyatt, R. (2014). Dropout

rates of massive open online courses: behavioural pat-

terns. EDULEARN14 proceedings, 1:5825–5834.

Qu, H. and Chen, Q. (2015). Visual analytics for MOOC

data. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications,

35(6):69–75.

Thirouard, M., Cahagne, C., Bernaert, O., and Jehl, D.

(2019). Storytelling and innovative digital techniques

which increase motivation levels of MOOC partici-

pants. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages

178–188. Springer International Publishing.

Zimmerman, B. J. (2008). Goal setting: A key proac-

tive source of academic self-regulation., pages 267–

295. Motivation and self-regulated learning: Theory,

research, and applications. Lawrence Erlbaum Asso-

ciates Publishers, Mahwah.

CSEDU 2023 - 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

208