Simple Gamification Goes a Long Way

By: Justin Ferriman • June 7, 2013
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gamificationToday there are many tips and tricks to help make elearning more effective.  You’ll find some people preaching interaction and animation during the delivery, but that can often be seen as distracting.  What really goes a long way in learner engagement is connecting the learner to the content – and one of the best ways to accomplish this is through some simple gamification of the content.

If you’re unfamiliar with gamification, it’s the use of game thinking and mechanics in non-gaming environments to help solidify learning.  Gamification can come in many forms, and it also ranges in complexity.  If you ever have been curious about implementing a gaming element into your learning, then one of the easiest ways to get started is through a point driven system.

It’s rather basic actually: you reward points (and possibly take away points) depending on how a user does when interacting with the content.  For example, if you have a quiz, you can easily assign a point value to each question (or varied points per response).  If you tie a  certain reward an obtained point value, then you have a way to create a leaderboard and comparisons among others.

This type of point-based gaming in learning should only be used where it makes sense.   If you have a social learning management system, it’s one way to help bolster the sense of community, competition (if team based), and personal achievement.  Even though this is an easy, quick way to create a layer of gaming within learning, a natural negative with this is it does focus on a rather basic reward & punishment model. Still, it doesn’t make it ineffective.

After adding this type of achievements method to your learning, you can then determine other viable strategies.  The point/achievement system is ideal though if you are operating an elearning type environment.  It is rather easy to set-up a profile that tracks the points obtained, allow for printing of certificates, and collecting of achievements.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter