Reward-based gamification strategies are proposed as a promising technique to increase student engagement in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), following its success in other small-scale educational settings. However, these strategies imply a number of orchestration tasks ( e.g ., design, management) that are usually carried out by instructors, and which may hinder their use and adoption. Furthermore, some MOOC distinctive features ( e.g ., scale, 24/7 availability, etc.) have considerable implications on how these gamification strategies are orchestrated, resulting in an unmanageable instructors’ workload in cases of manual operation. Therefore, an eventual adoption of gamification in MOOCs calls for automatic systems capable of decreasing the additional workload of instructors. The limitations identified in the current solutions ( e.g ., non-usable graphical interfaces, inflexible gamification designs) led us to propose and develop a new gamification system named GamiTool . An evaluation with 19 MOOC instructors and gamification designers showed the high design expressiveness, usability and potential for adoption of GamiTool. Hence, GamiTool can be used by instructors to improve students’ engagement, and also, by researchers to keep understanding the effects of gamification in MOOC settings.

Leadership in higher can influence the structurally embedding of educational technologies in higher education institutions. However, HEIs are complex pluralistic organizational environments with loosely coupled systems, diffused power and goal ambiguity which makes governance of educational innovations a wicked problem in which they have to balance dynamic complex interactions while also setting out a clear vision and enacting this vision towards organizational goals. This paper analyses four qualitative case studies with a focus on the choices made by leaders in four Dutch universities that aim to contribute to organisational educational innovation. We investigated the data through the lens of complexity leadership theory in which three types of leadership play an important role: administrative leadership (i.e. top-down oriented), adaptive leadership (i.e. bottom-up oriented) and enabling leadership that emerges as a leadership type between administrative and adaptive leadership and contributes to governing innovation in complex environments. This study sheds light on how, in the case of HEIs as complex environments, leaders made strategic choices and followed up on them to enable the innovative potential of the organisation.