Copyright © 2018 held by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. In: R. Orji, M. Kaptein, J. Ham, K. Oyibo, J. Nwokeji (eds.): Proceedings of the Personalization in Persuasive Technology Workshop, Persuasive Technology 2018, Waterloo, Canada, 17-04-2018, published at http://ceur-ws.org Personalized Persuasion for Promoting Students’ Engagement and Learning Fidelia A. Orji, Julita Vassileva, and Jim Greer Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan, Canada fao583@mail.usask.ca, jiv@cs.usask.ca, and jim.greer@usask.ca Abstract. This paper draws from persuasive system design (PSD) and best prac- tices to design a persuasive system for evaluating the effectiveness of personalizing three social influences strategies (social comparison, social learning, and competi- tion) in motivating students to engage in online learning activities and hence pro- mote deeper learning. The system takes into consideration students’ privacy while providing them with personalized persuasive visualizations of their class assess- ments and offers students opportunities to either compare their performance with other students’ performance in the course, observe other students’ grades, or com- pete with other students as a way of motivating them to increase their engagement and improve overall performance. Keywords: Persuasive Technology, Persuasive System Design, Persuasion Pro- file, Personalization, Learning, Students’ Engagement, Social Influence Strate- gies, Social Comparison, Social Learning, Competition. 1 Introduction Persuasive Technology (PT) is a term used to describe technologies that are designed for the primary purpose of changing users’ behaviour, attitude, and thoughts about an issue, without using coercion or deception [6]. PTs achieve their behaviour change ob- jectives using various persuasive strategies. Persuasive strategies are techniques that are used in PT design to motivate behaviour change. Various research has shown the effectiveness of PT intervention at motivating people to achieve a specific goal in do- mains such as health [20], physical activities [21], and even in education [4]. In educational domains, teachers tend to apply the principles of persuasion in class- rooms to encourage learning. However, technological innovations such as persuasive technology have moved the act of persuasion to the digital domain such that focus is now moving from human-human persuasion to computer-human persuasion. Human- human persuasion involves a human expert persuader trying to persuade a target audi- ence or another person (persuadee) while in computer-human persuasion, computer software is used to motivate a target audience to achieve a specific goal. For instance, Epstein and Cullinan [3] used human-human social comparison in educating and per- suading students with a behaviour disorder. On the other hand, computer software has been used for children to encourage them to improve their reading and writing skills