Can Gamification Help Make eLearning Fun?
eLearning is an efficient and cost-effective way to learn new skills, train your staff, and reinforce traditional classroom-based instruction. For all of its advantages, however, eLearning also has a reputation of being boring, not engaging, and more of a chore than a privilege.
Even though there have been many great technical advances in eLearning—video, interactivity, and storyboarding—with the exception of its use in technical training, employees still often say eLearning-based training is less than ideal.
While it's true that some of this reputation is related to poorly designed classes, the continued use of older technologies, and incorrectly followed eLearning best practices, it also lacks community, student-to-student interaction, and, in most cases, visible progress toward topic mastery.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big advocate of eLearning. In fact, my company develops and markets eLearning classes as both standalone products and in combination with our classroom-based IT management and soft skills training classes. I just think that eLearning must continue to evolve, grow, and improve like all technologies.
This evolution brings us to the question at hand: Can gamification be the silver bullet to make eLearning fun, communal, engaging, and exciting?
Gamification is the process of adding game-like activities and mechanics into nongame-based activities and can be used in a variety of business situations, including:
- Sales campaigns
- Customer affinity programs
- Employee motivation initiatives
- Employee and client or customer-based training
Gamification is also an ideal enhancement to eLearning because eLearning is already computer-based, content-rich, and question-and-answer-based, and stores student participation and response values.
That said, “gamifying” eLearning requires the addition of technical features, such as:
- Giving points for correctly answering questions and performed actions
- Including the concept of levels, which contain increasing complex activities and content
- Allowing students to move to a higher level of complexity only when they have illustrated mastery of the current level
- Giving badges and prizes based on student or player performance
- Showing scoreboards to facilitate completion
- Providing forums to facilitate student interaction and community
There are, of course, many other features, functions, and game mechanics that can be added, but the items listed above are a good beginning.
Beyond the technology, implementing quality "gamified" eLearning is more than simply throwing in a few new technical features. It requires the creation of quality and engaging content that is tied to specific organizational goals and provides true value to the learner—oh, and as the title above suggests, makes it conceptually engaging and a little bit fun.
