Don’t add gamification until you answer these five questions

February 3, 2016
by Steve Penfold

Is your gamification in elearning strategy underperforming? If you’re not seeing the desired results from your corporate elearning, gamification could be the solution you need. Before you go ahead and gamify your learning, however, you need to ask yourself how gamification will help you design great learning experiences. Gamification in business can be effective, but it needs to be right for your organization. Find out which questions you need to be asking first, here.

Here are five questions you should be asking yourself before you add gamification to corporate elearning.

1. What is the goal? Why are learners doing it?

This question helps you focus on what the course needs to achieve and whether gamification can help you achieve the results you need.

Do you need to engage the learners? Try hooking your learner in with a warmup: How many questions can they get right in thirty seconds? How many mistakes can they spot in a statement?
Do they need to improve their performance? Or build collaboration with other learners? Try giving them polls or scoring so they can compete on leader boards.
Is there knowledge or information learners need for their job? Give them a quick quiz to see how much they know, then branch to parts of the course where they’re a little shaky.
Do they need to develop new skills or simply gain knowledge about some important changes in the business, new product or service developments, or new rules or laws they need to comply with? Give them challenges, quests, or problems to solve that they can relate to.

Knowing where you’re going with the course and what outcomes you need to replicate within the gamified learning can help you settle on the specific elearning strategies best suited to reaching your goal. Adding gamification to workplace training is only worthwhile if it actively contributes to the quality of the course. Outlining what you want to achieved when you gamify your learning can help you identify whether gamification is the way to go.

2. What is the desired outcome?

At the end of your course, do learners need to know more about a topic? If so, you might want to build a quiz at the end so they can measure their progress and see their achievements. This form of elearning gamification adds a competitive element to their learning as well as a sense of satisfaction from visible progress.

Your learners may just need to understand where they can go to get support. In this case, give them a challenge to find answers by linking to other resources or websites.

Perhaps they need to become competent at specific tasks. For example, in the immersive interactive video Lifesaver, learners need to show they can perform CPR. The course makes use of the following gamifying elements:

Beat the clock feature – decision objects are timed to simulate the real event, where time is of the essence and making swift decisions can help save a life.
Levels are unlocked as you advance through the scenario by gaining points for correct decisions.

3. Who will the learner be as a game player?

Who is the gamification really for? Are learners better off doing your course alone or collaboratively with other learners? Is it designed for personal improvement or as an engagement activity? Can you pitch learners against each other in order to motivate them?

If your learners are lone wolves, try adding a ‘beat the clock’ feature to get them totally engrossed in the activities. For example, is this spot the fake smile challenge, learners have to keep an eye on the time while they undertake the interactive tasks.

Other gamification techniques for lone wolf learners could be opportunities to improve their score such as an interactive quiz with scoring that they can take as many times as they like), or ways to challenge themselves like locking the next level until they get the correct response).

Your online learners could be team players rather than lone wolves. Does it make sense to pitch them against others? Let your learners record their score for a quiz or collect and display badges. Use dynamic scoring to set up leaderboards so learners can compete against each other alone or in teams. As is the case with workplace learning and training in general, there are no strict black and white gamification rules. Trule effective gamification caters to the specific needs of the learner, enhancing the quality of the course and its learning power by gamifying learning.

4. What does the interaction framework look like?

Do your learners need to access lots of information in your course? Can you deploy case studies that convey information in a familiar context? What tasks and actions do learners need to be able to do? Depending on your answers to these sorts of questions, you can begin looking for interactions that will deliver a worthwhile workplace learning experience.

Some of the most effective gamification examples replicate real scenarios, bringing learning to life.

Instead of giving learners information, give them scenarios in which they are immersed in real-life situations and have to make decisions in order to move to the next stage of the story.

Medieval Swansea is an example of scenario-driven elearning with branching. Learners journey through a series of stages to unlock a medieval mystery. Interactive challenges allow them to gather points and bonuses in order to tackle the quest.

5. What variables will learners choose from?

Consider the options that learners will need to weigh up.

Do they need to decide between objects to take on a mission? (Select job aids to help complete a task).
Do they need to answer a question correctly in order unlock the next task? (A yes/no question or a multiple choice question, set a rule to allow the learner to move to the next question or along a pathway).

These sorts of questions will help you anticipate what you need to include in your storyboard or how your gamified elearning project view may look.

Each question can lead a learner down a different pathway. You need to factor in these sequences when you design the course. Storyboarding the course with each different learning path is a good way to visualize your course before you begin to build.

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Conclusion

Gamification isn’t really about playing games, it’s all about designing engaging interactions that will hook learners, motivate them to continue the course, and help them get a sense of enjoyment and fulfilment on completing it.

Ultimately, you want to be asking, does this element of design make the course a better experience for the learner? And be honest, because a word game may be great if you’re teaching your learners a new language, but if it doesn’t fix a problem, go back to your storyboard and change it.

Steve Penfold

Elucidat CEO & Co-founder Steve comes from a family of teachers and has a history of running successful software companies. It is of no surprise that he ended up co-founding and investing in Elucidat! His passion is driving value for Elucidat’s customers and solving the (very real) challenges experienced by corporate Learning and Development teams. Prior to Elucidat, he co-founded a web-based software company named PROJECTminder, which helped architects save time and money when managing a high volume of projects – it was well received and ultimately led to an acquisition by the IRIS Group. His specialty lies in helping digital businesses operate more efficiently, drive sales & increase profits.