According to the Global Gamification Market Report 2021-2025, the industry of gamification in e-learning courses is expected to grow by 19.69% by 2025. Following this, another report from famous insurer Gartner has shown that 70% of the Global 2000 List of companies are using Gamification in their Online Training.
Furthermore, according to another survey, almost 40% of the world’s leading organizations set their eLearning training towards gamification last year in 2021. The question that arises here is: “Why is there a rising demand for gamification?”, “Why gamification for online training becomes such a fast-paced industry?” and most importantly, “Why do you need gamification in your online training?”
This article will walk you through all the essentials of gamification you need to know. Moreover, we will also provide you with examples of using gamification in eLearning courses. And lastly, how you can implement this rising trend in your online training.
What Gamification in E-learning Courses is
Shortly described, gamification means incorporating the fun and game-based elements in the non-game situations of the real-life world. These non-game situations can be anything, e.g. websites, LMSes, online communities, and online trainings.
The main goal of gamification is to recreate any boring tasks into something fun by including the gaming activities like points, competitions, game levels, etc. This gamifying of the regular and otherwise tedious tasks helps organizations engage their employees and students in their online training. To define gamification, have a look at the definition Wikipedia provided us:
“Gamification techniques strive to leverage people’s natural desires for socializing, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure.”
This means gamification is not just about adding fun elements to make learning fun. It is a technique to make the best use of different human potentials. Many workers in organizations complain about the bulky and boring eLearning courses that they either don’t want to start or cannot complete due to boredom.
To combat such issues, the technology specialists came up with this gamification technique to make the whole process of online training entertaining, engaging, accessible, and more immersive.
Why is There a Need for Gamification in eLearning?
When it comes to gamification, we think about completing game levels, competitions, gaining high scores, and other things we see in our games. But the thing to notice here is that it doesn’t include “playing games” at all, most of the time. Here, gamification is not just about playing games – it is about designing the non-gaming content with game-based thinking.
But why is there a need for gamification in eLearning? Not just in eLearning, there is a need for gamification in every such training where employers are needed to stay motivated to keep learning and achieving specific actions and activities. Gamified online training helps the organizations provide their employees with game-based learning, which will keep them engaged with the eLearning courses. As a result, they willingly complete the challenges and tasks assigned to them just to score higher than their competitors.
Different game mechanics make the employee’s work more transparent and more manageable by giving them clear goals to follow. For example, there are two managers in the same industry. To qualify for the Ambassador position, they need to take several online training and complete assignments and challenges to be eligible for the job.
To keep them really engaged with the learning content, the authors designed a game-based content that gives them scores upon completion of each assignment. And the manager with more scores will qualify for the position. This exciting and fun-based way encourages the potential employees to stay competitive and learn what the employer wants them to know.
Moreover, the feedback system, which immediately shows the workers their scoreboard, helps them understand where they need to work more and what areas they are fine in. Gamification in e-learning courses also allows the collaboration with different workers to complete the tasks alongside competitions, which also incorporates the sense of socializing and teamwork in the employees.
Benefits of Gamification for Online Training
Gamification in eLearning is not just an option now, it is a need. When done strategically, gamification helps businesses to improve in several ways. For example, gamification can:
- Help businesses increase the adoption rate and use of learning management tools for online training.
- Promote employee retention and the results of online training.
- Improve employee performance and customer satisfaction.
- Help increase the employee’s knowledge-sharing abilities, improving a company’s service levels.
Overall, gamification in e-learning courses can increase the employee motivation in any workspace to learn and achieve higher results than their fellow competitors.
7 Main Benefits of Gamification for Online Training
1. Better Learning Environment
No employees like working in a strict and boring workspace and often leave online training and skip most of it just to get it done. Gamification in e-learning courses has solved this problem as well. It has provided an effective and informal learning environment for employees to openly perform tasks and practice real-life situations in a much more enjoyable way. This promotes a much better learning environment which causes more knowledge retention.
2. Better Learning Experience for Employee
A thoughtfully designed gamification strategy helps employees to experience fun during their learning and still keeps track of their engagement. These strategies help to improve an organization’s recall and retention, which is a significant need in today’s world.
3. Immediate Feedback Helps Employees to Learn Better
When the employees have a scoreboard or report of performance in their hand or on the screens after each task, they will have a clear idea of what they are doing. Employees who are knowledgeable of their performance tend to perform better in upcoming functions than those who do not.
Gamifying this process has made it much easier and more manageable. Take an example of an employee who is learning a game-based eLearning course. To gain a prize chest and move to level two, he must complete four assignments. He finishes them, but in the end, he still is level one. He receives a report indicating where it didn’t go right and that the strategy he used is unsuitable for completing this task.
In normal cases, where there is no gamification involved, employees disheartened due to low scores and not knowing where they are lacking often skip the retesting or re-practicing and move to the next chapter of their course.
But in a gamification-based eLearning course, the employer will go back to his work and take other approaches to complete the same assignment to claim the prize and reach level two. In short, an immediate feedback system and the gamification of this general step can help businesses to keep their employees engaged in the learning process.
4. Gamification Helps in All Learning Needs
Induction, customer support, soft skills, product sales, onboarding, compliance, awareness creation, and other learning needs can be easily managed and fulfilled via gamification.
5. Gamification Ensures Behavioral Changes
The benefits of gamification in e-learning courses are not just at surface level. Instead, an organization’s advantages by gamifying their online training go deeper and prompt behavioral changes in their employees.
6. Promotes Healthy Learning Culture
A healthy learning culture is necessary for every organization, which helps the employees and other workers to come together in a single space and share their knowledge. The eLearning gamification promotes the organization’s learning culture by keeping the employees engaged in not just learning content but also with fellow workers in the form of competitions and collaborations.
7. Impact on Organization
An organization that provides its employees with highly strategic online training progresses more than those who just go with traditional ways of handing out courses to all the employees, not catering to their needs. In addition, Gamification in e-learning courses has a significant impact by ensuring performance gains for organizations, helping them reach their goals more successfully.
How to Introduce Gamification in E-learning Courses?
Introducing gamification in eLearning courses doesn’t mean introducing a full-fledged game in your learning culture. Instead, gamified eLearning means creating learning content with the gaming elements incorporated. Or in other words, designing a game that engages and educates simultaneously and then integrating this game in your online training. The three simple ways which can help you introduce gamification in eLearning courses are:
1. Engagement and Motivation are Key
The most important thing to consider while doing eLearning gamification is to keep content engaging and motivating enough to encourage employees to keep learning and completing their assigned tasks.
To keep your online training engaging, try incorporating gaming elements that prompt the employees to achieve higher scores and subsequent levels. You can make your online training content engaging and motivating by following the steps:
- Quest
Creating quizzes and quests is an excellent way which can help you keep your workers in touch with the eLearning courses. After each course level is complete, giving them quizzes to solve and earning extra points in return is an excellent strategy to gamify eLearning.
- Feedback
People feel motivated when they know they are going in the right direction and that their approaches to solving the specific problems are correct. Hence, providing the workers with immediate feedback on their performance will keep them motivated that they are doing right. A leaderboard is a significant gaming element in this regard. Employees will work hard to see their names on the leaderboard.
- Interaction
Providing fun ways of interacting with other employees is another strategy to implement gamification in eLearning courses. For example, providing every worker their specific avatar is a great way to give them their identity in the online training. And giving different options for interactions like video calling, audio calling, chatting, and texting will help your employees openly socialize and learn team skills.
- Stories
Do not handle the learning content as it is. Instead, creating the learning content in a compelling storyline that will capture the user’s attention every time they start learning is a goal of gamified eLearning.
2. Keep it Challenging
Creating challenges for the employees is a great way to keep them engaged with the learning material. Providing them with real-life tasks and assignments in a fun way will lessen the burden of new projects every other day. Providing challenges also means dividing the entire training content into a series of small challenges to achieve the overall goal.
Scenario Learning, Storytelling, dynamic polling, etc., are some strategies you can use to introduce gamification for online training.
3. Create a Sense of Accomplishment for Your Employees
Creating a reward system in your gamified eLearning is the most helpful practice. Giving your incentives like scores, badges, medals, certificates and unlocking new levels will generate a sense of accomplishment for your employees. In compliance training, using an achievement or reward system to demonstrate the workforce competence is another excellent strategy to keep track of the employee’s progress.
What are Examples of Gamification Strategies?
- A story-led-life-saving game with multiple award-winning solutions with immersive storytelling and strong yet fun characters is the most used way of gamifying the online training content. Users take these types of eLearning courses as a challenge to complete. Each level or chapter holds a section of the story. To unlock the next chapter or level, they have to learn the first one thoroughly.
- Scenario-based games have a great demand in the corporate industry because it is low-cost audio-driven simulation to introduce gamification in eLearning courses. The employees are usually the character of that scenario. They are given different scenarios in which they have to act using different approaches to complete one scenario and move on to the next one.
- A gamified timed quiz is another great gamification strategy you can use. But this timed quiz might not be in just text form. Instead, you can use audio or animated quizzes. Again, the users will take it as a fun game rather than an assessment after each level of learning is complete.
Conclusion
Gamification in e-learning courses has more importance than you might imagine. If you consider the impact of gamification on eLearning more deeply than on the surface level, you will be surprised at its benefits to your organization.
Implementing gamification in your eLearning courses can be difficult, but suitable approaches can make it easy. For example, using an LMS with gamification features or creating gamified online training catering to the needs of your employees, with the guidance of content developers, can make the whole process of incorporating gamification in e-learning far more accessible and manageable. Visit and follow our Twitter and LinkedIn to find out more!
