• Information Systems Review
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.73-91
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• 2024

Recently, e-learning platforms are rapidly growing by innovating the education industry by applying various IT technologies. Because student participation in the online environment is considered a prerequisite for learning, low participation rates are considered one of the most important issues determining the performance of e-learning platforms. Gamification has grown rapidly over the past decades and is highly valued for its applicability in education because it is expected to enhance learning motivation. However, despite the interest of researchers, previous studies have reported conflicting results on the effect of gamification on participation rates in the context of e-learning platforms, and have mainly studied structural gamification, but have not sufficiently addressed the effects of content gamification. In this context, this study aims to analyze the effect of content gamification on e-learning platform engagement and to explore the boundary conditions moderating this effect. For empirical analysis, 5,017 data registered from February 11, 2022 to May 31, 2022 were analyzed for the education platform entry (https://playentry.org). The propensity score matching method and Poisson multilevel regression model were applied as analysis methods. As a result of the analysis, content gamification had a statistically significant effect on engagement, and the interaction effects of interaction and content difficulty were statistically significant.