ASSESSMENT OF MOTIVATION IN GAMING BASED E-LEARNING Ioana Ghergulescu National College of Ireland, School of Computing Mayor Street, Dublin, Ireland ioana.ghergulescu@student.ncirl.ie Cristina Hava Muntean National College of Ireland, School of Computing Mayor Street, Dublin, Ireland cmuntean@ncirl.ie ABSTRACT The technological developments characteristic to today’s digital era have contributed to significant advances in the area of e-learning and in particular gaming based e-learning. To better suit learners’ particular needs, the latest Adaptive e- Learning Systems (AeLS) personalise the educational content and the learning process according to their knowledge, goals, preferences, etc. However, since keeping students motivated for the entire learning session still represents a challenging task, assessment and measurement of learners motivation is currently one of the main research area in e- learning. On another hand, due to the high success of gaming among young people, e-learning systems started to integrate gaming into the learning process. However, currently the educational games do not follow the same trend that sees games in general becoming more affective. Therefore, they are not motivational as they can be. This paper bridges research from the areas of motivation assessment in e-learning and affective gaming, and presents how various motivation modeling solutions used by e-learning systems, can be used for assessing learners’ motivation in adaptive gaming based e-learning. KEYWORDS Learner’s motivation, motivation assessment, gaming based e-learning 1. INTRODUCTION The exponential technological advances over the last decade have gradually brought us in the era of digital technology. Nowadays, learners changed from “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants” (Prensky 2001a, b) to a “Digital Wisdom” generation (Prensky 2009). Being a “Digital Wisdom” means not only using and manipulating technology easily but also making wiser decisions because “one is enhanced by technology”. Thus is because technology enhances our thinking and understanding every day. These technological developments have also partly contributed to the significant progress that has been made in the area of e-learning. Furthermore, e-learning is continuously evolving, looking forward to new features and ideas to improve the learning process and the learning experience (Kahiigi 2008). E-learning systems for instance, have evolved over the past years towards adaptive e-learning systems that make use of the learner’s preferences, knowledge, goals in order to adapt the delivered content. Despite personalising the learning process and the educational content, to better suit each particular learner, reaching and engaging today’s learners is still considered a challenging task (Little & Page 2009), while the learning process may be considered by the students to be boring and forced. Therefore, keeping students motivated for the entire learning period continues to represent one of the biggest challenge, not only in e-learning, but in all forms of learning. However, while in traditional face-to-face learning, teachers have direct contact with the students, thus being able to analyse the whole learner’s behaviour, in the e-learning context, motivation detection and