Unlocking Knowledge Through Escape Rooms in Online Higher Education: Proposal for Learning About Consumer Behavior

Introduction

It is becoming increasingly difficult to motivate students through traditional teaching methods, such as lectures, videos or tutorials. The problem with this type of didactic methods is that students are passive learners because there is hardly any interactivity with them (Phelps & Vlachopoulos, 2019). As a result, teachers are seeking to innovate their teaching practices in an attempt to engage students in their subjects and get them to learn (Navarro-Mateos & Pérez-López, 2022). As a potential solution, game-based learning has received increased attention from the education sector, as well as from academia and industry. It promises new opportunities to foster skills and increase knowledge by breaking out from the traditional classroom (Putz et al., 2020; Warmelink et al., 2017).

In recent years, escape rooms have been created not only for recreational purposes, but also as proposals for educational innovation. Thus, educational escape rooms (EERs) can be defined as a game with an educational learning purpose in which students have to discover clues, solve puzzles and complete riddles in one or more rooms, in order to achieve an objective (usually escape from the room) in a limited time. EERs are problem-based and time-constrained pedagogical activities that require participants to be active and collaborative in order to promote their learning (Veldkamp et al., 2020). Hence, they are used as an attempt to increase student motivation and engagement, by having fun and enjoying the experience.

In today’s educational landscape, EERs scenarios are promising trends which can be implemented into many academic disciplines in higher education, such as English language learning (Santamaría & Alcalde, 2019), healthcare (Darby et al., 2020), mathematics (Fuentes-Cabrera et al., 2020), computer science (López-Pernas et al., 2019), or chemical engineering (De la Flor et al., 2020), among others.

Since EERs are considered to be an innovative and gamification-based educational methodologies, they should be designed with great consideration and follow the proper pedagogical theories to encourage the achievement of further learning (López-Pernas et al., 2019). In fact, not only academic achievement is achieved, but EERs also allow the development of competencies such as communication skills during the game and creative thinking (Fotaris & Mastoras, 2019).

Even though many studies have been conducted applying EERs into the physical classroom, studies carried out in an online classroom are scarcely to be found. Moreover, no scientific research has been conducted to explore the application and effects of a digital EER in online higher education on the subject of consumer behavior. This subject is included in the syllabus of several subjects, such as marketing or psychology, but this article focuses on the syllabus of the Master's Degree in Neuromarketing at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). Its relevance lies in the fact that the main profiles in this field tend to come from social sciences, so they have limited knowledge of how the nervous system works and, in particular, the brain, which is the subject of interest. Thus, the content related to more psychological and cerebral aspects tends to be arduous and perhaps fails to sufficiently stimulate students' interest and motivation.

Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to provide a detailed proposal on the implementation of an EER in an online higher education environment. It is hoped that it will help students to consolidate the knowledge acquired in the subject of consumer behavior, as well as serve as a basis for other teachers to implement this methodology in their classrooms. To achieve this goal, it is explained how the current educational landscape requires active learning methodologies, then the role of gamification in education is highlighted, and finally the potential of educational escape rooms is discussed. Afterwards, a practical proposal that can be implemented in a real scenario is established.