On February 24th, at 2:30 pm, Francisco Regalado defended his Master’s Degree in Multimedia Communication with the Dissertation “Gamifying News for the miOne Online Community”. In his defense, a gamified strategy was developed in the context of the miOne community and a set of strategies to be used within the context of news and online communities were recommended.

On February 24th, at 2:30 pm, Francisco Regalado gave his Master’s Degree exams in Multimedia Communication on the Zoom platform. His dissertation entitled “Gamification for all in a multi-tentant environment: The case of Campus platforms by Altice and miOne foundation” was supervised by professors Ana Veloso and Liliana Costa and by Prof. Michael Loizou, University of Coventry.

This Development Research reports, firstly, the motivations and the context of use in digital platforms by adult learners from the Universities of the Third Age (UTAs), supporting the design and development of a gamification strategy in the context of an online community entitled miOne. To meet this challenge, a questionnaire survey that was administered to 248 people aged 50 and over from 16 different countries. Secondly, a digital artifact was developed, applying gamification to online news, within the miOne online community. This artifact was validated with 6 national newspaper players to understand the challenges posed to the journalistic sector and assess the product’s relevancy to the market. Finally, the proposed solution was tested with 11 participants from Universities of the Third Age. 

The results suggest that the developed mechanics and gamification elements can engage older adults with online news on digital platforms. Additionally, these can guide the integration of a gamification strategy in the previously mentioned context. These interconnected elements are: (i) a leaderboard with the most weekly news’ interactions; (ii) levels with different missions and rewards (external and internal to the platform); and (iii) a community-endorsed award system to recognize and validate user-generated content towards news.