5 Effective Ways to Integrate Gamification in eLearning

Gamification is the future of eLearning. For ages, motivational theorists have discussed the importance of  interactive, immersive training courses in improving the employee learning experience and their role in boosting employee motivation at work. To ensure this, gamification can act as an essential catalyst for making training sessions more fun and engaging, thereby enhancing motivation in the workplace. Hence, organizations should consider integrating gamification into their corporate training programs to beat the mundane processes of long training sessions.

Use collaboration opportunities for feedback

So in this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of gamification in eLearning and 5 effective ways to integrate it in eLearning. Are you ready to understand gamification in detail and enliven your eLearning courses with gamification?

Let’s begin!

How Gamification Improves Corporate Training

There are a number of ways that gamification can  improve corporate training. Here’s a comprehensive list:

• Gamification helps create a learning environment where participation, collaboration and socialization are encouraged. This helps foster teamwork and understanding among employees. Using elements like points, badges, leaderboards, etc., motivates employees to give their best and coordinate with each other when it comes to inter-department performance.
• Gamification helps you tackle the issue of disengagement and boredom as it provides a fun way for employees at all levels within an organization to engage with each other. This allows for better interaction and communication opportunities between team members. Moreover, employees also get to engage with the learning material in a more interesting manner.

Benefits of Gamification in eLearning

You can use gamification to increase engagement, retention and performance.

• Increases engagement: Gamification offers you a way to make your training content more interesting for employees. You can leverage different elements like points, badges, leaderboards, scenarios, etc., to grab the attention of the learners and maintain their interest in the eLearning courses. Moreover, this also benefits you in motivating your employees to complete their training courses faster and in an effective manner.
• Improves learning: By adding in elements like leaderboards, unlocking achievements, ranks, rewards, etc., you can stimulate a response from your learners to proceed with the eLearning course. In fact, these game-based elements can also be leveraged to prevent long gaps between the learning as they encourage the learners to come back and complete the learning modules and achieve their final goals before their competitors.
• Better retention rate: The rate of information retention plays a crucial role in determining the effectiveness of corporate training. Gamification helps in achieving better retention rates as it motivates learners to finish their courses at a faster rate and in an immersive manner.
• Facilitates collaboration and coordination: Gamification helps create a learning environment where participation, collaboration and socialization are encouraged. This helps foster teamwork and understanding among employees. Using elements like levels, points, quests, progress status, leaderboards, etc., motivates employees to give their best and coordinate with each other when it comes to inter-department performance.

5 Effective Ways to Integrate Gamification in eLearning

If you want to ensure effective, successful corporate training, it is important to design engaging, immersive, and learner-centric eLearning courses.

It helps your employees to be engaged with the material and make progress toward their learning objectives.  Apart from the elements mentioned above, you can incorporate gamification into your training programs. Let’s see how you can integrate gamification in your eLearning courses for desirable, more positive training results.

It helps you put together a training course that your employees enjoy along with learning new concepts and skills that contribute to improving their performance.

• Use points or badges as rewards for completing assignments or tasks on time or early
• Create an online course where participants compete against one another based on each week’s completion rate
• Allow employees who complete certain tasks before others get access to bonus content such as videos/lessons from experts in the field

1. Integrate Activities, Assessments, and Modules with Gamification

Completing various activities, assessments,  and modules in the eLearning course can be linked with gamification. You can integrate elements like badges, points, rewards, challenges, levels, etc., in eLearning to play on human nature to compete and accept a challenge. This will boost your learners’ sense of achievement and motivate them to continue learning and do better in the upcoming tasks and assignments. Therefore, gamification offers you multiple opportunities to build a sense of achievement among your learners.

2. Reuse Your eLearning Courses with Gamification

Got some eLearning courses with informative, relevant content simply lying in your repository because you can’t use them anymore as it was only half-way through the session and your learners were already looking at their watches for the session to be over? Don’t worry!

It’s time to revisit and dust them off. Gamification can definitely breathe life into them to boost engagement, interactivity, and interest. You can repurpose the content of your eLearning courses. Explore the 4Rs of rapid eLearning in the infographic below.

3. Consider Using Gamification in Stories and Scenarios

Gamification is a way to make learning more fun, engaging, and memorable. It encourages learners to continue learning by earning badges or points toward achievements. Therefore, you can present your learners with different scenarios and stories that require them to take action in order to proceed to the next step. Check out the video to know 5 storytelling tips.

This can help your learners in developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Moreover, it can also be a good way to train them on decision-making processes and build practical skills. In fact, using gamification helps employees master skills as they can try the scenarios again by making different decisions leading to different results.

4. Leverage Gamification for Feedback

Feedback plays  a crucial role in corporate training. Whether you are providing the feedback or trying to obtain it. It helps you get an insight into how effective your training program was. You can use the gathered data to identify the areas where your eLearning course was successful and where you need to improve.

So if you’re trying to garner feedback you can integrate elements like points, rewards, badges, etc., to promote active participation. On the other hand, if you’re providing feedback to the learners, you can use elements like progress bars, levels, ranks, etc. With that said, make sure the feedback is relevant to the eLearning courses and simple to understand. It should help learners in achieving their learning objectives and improving their performance and productivity.

5. Use Collaboration Opportunities for Gamification

We’re sure you must have heard the phrase, “United we stand, divided we fall.” It very captures the essence and importance of teamwork. When channeled correctly, team spirit can be a game-changer. To foster this value and use it in your training programs, you can integrate gamification into eLearning.

You can leverage gamified elements like quests, treasure hunts, or other team-based challenges for collaboration opportunities to facilitate engagement, socialization, coordination, and cooperation. Apart from that, you can also benefit from integrating gamification for collaboration to train your employees on leadership skills and qualities.

Wrapping It Up!

Gamification is an innovative, creative, and equally effective approach to ensure successful corporate training. It enables you to handle the challenges of traditional training methods and even a few modern training methods in a proficient manner. From boosting interactivity to fostering engagement to improving retention, gamification in eLearning offers it all! Then why keep waiting? Integrate gamification in eLearning today! (Now you even know 5 effective ways to do so). And we’ve got you covered on the evaluate the training effectiveness aspect as well. Check out this webinar on learning analytics and churning out useful data-driven insights.