Game-theory-based motivation model for social learning platforms

Abstract

During the last decade, social applications have witnessed a rapid growth in their use. Millions of people are utilising them on a daily basis in order to share their experience, information and to communicate with their family members and friends. Lately, these technologies have been used to foster collaboration in education, however, it is a case of hit and miss and without established techniques to ensure or replicate success. A number of factors contribute to the limited success of such groups, one such factor is the presence of free riding members. A free riding member adopts a behaviour that takes advantage of the collaborative group without contributing back. Such a behaviour will affect the group’s sustainability and affect the participants willingness to contribute. This thesis proposes to formally analyse the impact of the free riding behaviour in educational social networking sites using repeated game theory. The analysis with classical and generous Tit for Tat shows that free riding impacts the survivability of the group and raises the need for motivational features to encourage free riders to collaborate. Reputation based Tit for Tat strategies are hence proposed to motivate free riders to cooperate under the threat of being penalised. Unfortunately such strategies do not only penalise free riders but also cooperative users who are reluctant to answer others’ requests either due to lack of knowledge or confidence. Therefore, an enhanced generous reputation-based Tit-for-Tat strategy with a points system is proposed as a solution that gives cooperative users a second chance to prove they are not free riding. Such approach helps putting in place mechanisms to encourage non contributing cooperative learners to participate rather than punishing them and excluding them from the group. To validate the obtained theoretical and simulation results, an educational social networking site called ELSE was implemented. ELSE is underpinned by a motivational model that is derived from our game theoretical model and study of motivation. A field study that includes 100 students studying a programming course has been conducted at Khalifa University during the Spring 2013 semester. The field study included a pre-trial survey to understand students usage of social networking sites and a post-trial survey to understand their usage of ELSE. During the trial, the number of active users and the number of contributions per day were recorded. The field study confirmed the findings of the game theory and showed that the motivational model was able to motivate students to collaborate and keep the group alive.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Rabeb Mizouni (Supervisor)