Content evaluation and gamification for educational platforms

An online digital platform for educational content can be a valuable asset for students both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers can send and interact with shared content, while other teachers can also benefit from the platform. However, not all content is suitable for sharing, thus it is essential to have a system for approving educational materials. This presents several challenges, as such: how to validate individuals interested in helping others approve content, how to make the system self-sustainable, and how to keep users engaged and motivated. In this article, we describe our educational platform created for the Brazilian federal government, including the challenges faced and our proposed solution. Our system selects motivated users who have interacted enough with the platform to approve other people’s content for publishing by using a priority queue for content approval. To keep users engaged, we implemented a gamification mechanism that encourages user interaction, facilitates taste sharing, and collects metadata. Our solution is efficient, self-sustaining, engaging, and aims to be more suitable, from a social network point-of-view, than previously used solutions.