In this article, we’ll be looking at gamification strategy to see if it’s a better approach for learners to acquire knowledge. We’ll also look at how it enhances the learning experience.

So, there’s a need to address the issues and make organizations see reasons to continue with or without the learning strategy.

What is gamification in eLearning?

Most people misunderstand gamification, and that affects the way it’s utilized to develop gamified learning. Some people see it as game-based learning that involves learners playing games, and that’s completely wrong.

Although gamification can involve using badges, points, and leaderboards, there’s more to it than that. To develop a better-gamified learning course, an instructional designer needs to focus more on the intrinsic motivational aspects of it.

What that means is that it doesn’t matter if you use badges or points as far as your focus is on intrinsic motivation. To the burning question, Does gamification truly helps learners to learn? The answer without a second thought is Yes.

We’ll be exploring how it can help to enhance the learning experience.

How gamification can enhance the learning experience

No doubt, everybody likes to get rewarded for their efforts. In the case of online training, badges are essential to acknowledge Learners’ effort for completing a course. That helps to trigger them to complete the training course.

Gamification strategy is an essential tool in e-learning to improve the learning experience. Here are five Gamification can help you to enhance your learning experience.

Intrinsic Motivation

In gamification, intrinsic motivation comes from behavior driven by internal rewards. That means that employees get engaged, not because of the tangible rewards they received for completing a course, but because of the passion, for acquiring knowledge.

Here are some examples of what intrinsic motivation looks like:

• A sense of progress in a specific learning course.
• A sense of competence.
• Self-actualization and Pleasure.
• Accomplishing a difficult task.

Intrinsic motivation is a way gamification can help learners to enhance their learning experience. It brings out the passion in a learner to complete a specific training course.

Extrinsic Motivation

Unlike intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation drives you to achieve something because of the tangible rewards attached to it. Even if you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, extrinsic motivation ensures that you complete the training to achieve results.

Some common examples of extrinsic motivation include

• Rewards for displaying specific behavior.
• Threats of punishment for failing to attain a specified point.
• Competition
• Trophies for emerging winners

All these factors of extrinsic motivation can enhance the learning experience and drive learners to complete training and ask for more.

Motivations through recognitions

Recognizing your employees’ effort and commitment in an organization is one way of driving them to learn better. Apart from that, it’s also an effective way to enhance employees’ learning experience.

When you recognize their efforts publicly or privately, they feel more accomplished and tend to do better. You can also make it feel more worthwhile by enabling them to view and share the awards on social platforms with their colleagues.

That can help to motivate other learners to do better and get recognized as well.

Set rewards for each milestone, instead of just the learning goal

Instead of just focusing on the big goal, you can create rewards for each milestone. That’ll help to drive learners to finish a particular milestone and progress to another.

While long-term goals can reduce learners’ motivation, shorter milestones can help to motivate them. Apart from that, employees tend to retain knowledge when they acquire knowledge in bite-sized compared to long training.

Competition

Here’s another way that gamification can help to enhance the learning experience. By creating a healthy competition among your employees, every one of them would want to emerge as winners to acquire rewards.

You can make it more worthwhile by adding names of learners with the highest badges/points on the leaderboard. That’ll attract other employees to put in more effort to achieve points.

With gamification, you can enhance your employee learning experience in your organization. You can also improve their engagement level and help them boost their retention ability.

Although creating a gamified learning course might seem hard, with a good authoring tool like Wizcabin, you can make the process seamless.