Blog Round-up: Gamification

By: LearnDash Collaborator September 9, 2020
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Gamification is one of the most effective ways to increase learner engagement in your course.

If you’ve spent enough time reading about how to design an engaging online course, you’ve probably heard of gamification. While the buzz word may be recent, the concept itself is not. People have been looking for ways to turn learning into a game for a long time, so it’s no surprise that people want to find ways to apply this strategy to e-learning as well.

Whether you want to help your learners learn more effectively, boost their motivation, track their goals, or simply lessen the tedium of memorizing new material, adding game-like elements can get you there. And given the wide range of plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem, adding these features to your course is a lot easier than you might think.

Here’s a roundup of some of our best posts on the topic to help you get started.

1. 5 Ways to Use Gamification in E-Learning

Let’s start with the basics: how do you use gamification in e-learning anyway? In this post we cover five popular ways to gamify your courses, including:

  • Leaderboards
  • Badges
  • Points and currency
  • Progress bars and “level ups”
  • Virtual scenarios

2. How to Master Mobile Gamification

As learning becomes more mobile, having gamification elements that work well on smaller screens is essential. When done right, an e-learning course that uses mobile gamification elements can deliver an experience that delivers material to learners wherever they are, and whenever they need it.

3. Copy This Proven E-Learning Gamification Strategy

Feeling overwhelmed by the different gamification options? There’s one simple strategy you can use right away to increase learner buy-in for your course: points. Use them to reward learners for finishing lessons, to encourage them to finish an orientation course, or to prompt them to participate on your forum. Let your learners start accumulating points now, and decide later what you want to do with them.

4. Gamification Is Still Proving to Be Big for Business

What about gamifaction for businesses? If you’re under the impression that gamification is only for educators who want to entice learners to take their courses with bells and whistles, you would be mistaken. Gamification isn’t just a gimmick—it’s actually improves course outcomes for learners. That in turn offers a very impressive ROI for businesses, making it essential for organizations of all sizes.

5. 6 Gamification Benefits You Should Know

Speaking of the benefits of gamification, they are worth reading about in more detail. Understanding why gamification is such an effective learning tool can help you consider more ways to apply it in your course. From using immediate feedback to reinforce correct answers to providing motivation for long-lasting behavioral change, gamification has a lot to offer.

6. The 3 Levels of Gamification (No One Is Doing Number 3)

From a learner perspective, gamification often feels like a passive experience. They gain points, level up their skills, earn badges, but many of these are just markers along a preordained path, as opposed to a road they construct for themselves. But what if educators could put learners in charge of their experience, so that they had more of a sense of ownership over their learning experience? Our post explores what this might look like.

7. Applying Gamification to Live Training

We’re offer an e-learning plugin, so naturally we mostly discuss gamification in relation to online courses. But can gamification also be applied to live training? There’s no reason it shouldn’t be—for the same reason that your life training should be linked to your online courses.

Are you ready to add gamification to your course?

Courses of all kinds can—and should—be using gamification to enhance their courses. With everything WordPress has to offer in the form of plugins and add-ons, there’s nothing holding you back from integrating it into your course in new and exciting ways.

LearnDash Collaborator

A LearnDash specialist wrote this article to help guide new and current LearnDash members.