The concept of gaming seems unrelated to learning but the phrase ‘Gamification in Education’ has been the talk of the town so to speak for years. It is a concept that’s really changed the way students learn for the better and that’s true for both offline and online learning.
To give your students the best learning experience, you must join in on the trend. And don’t fret if you’ve got no idea where to start because we’ll be going over the right gamification strategies you can adopt to instantly level up your LMS site in this article.
What is Gamification
The million-dollar question of the day — what is Gamification exactly? Well, basically the term is used to indicate the application of various game-playing elements to other things like education, marketing, workplace, and more.
In order to adopt this concept, you need to take aspects of a game and integrate them into your courses in a seamless way that attracts your students’ attention and motivates them to work harder.
Gamification Benefits
Before going any further, let us discuss the advantages that come with adopting gamification strategies and in what way they benefit students:
- Increases student engagement: It’s a proven fact that students will be more invested in learning if a reward system is involved and this concept has been used in education for years before the term gamification was ever coined.
- Students are better motivated: Because the classes will be more engaging, students will also be more enthusiastic about it.
- Learning progress is visible: With the help of various gamification elements, visualizing a student’s progress is much simpler.
- Higher information retention: Gamification not only increases students’ enthusiasm but also helps students better understand and retain what they learn.
- Increases social connections: Gamification can help introverted students make more connections through group activities.
The Right Gamification Strategies
Alright, let’s now finally get to the main point of this article —gamification strategies to level up your LMS site. Below is a list of the most popular and effective ways to gamify your courses.
1. Progress Indicators (Points and Badges)
Points and Badges are an important part of game playing. These progress indicators can be effortlessly adapted into education and are a sure-fire way to motivate your students because it gives them a tangible goal to work towards. Students can earn these upon completing courses, quizzes, and more.
2. Ranking
The next goal for students after earning Points and Badges is Mastery, i.e. leveling up, which gives students a sense of accomplishment and joy. Not only does it motivate them, but it also allows instructors to visually track their progress.
3. Leaderboards
What better way to track leveling up or ranking other than using Leaderboards right? Appearing on a leaderboard increases the students’ competitive spirit and if handled correctly, it can be another way to positively motivate them further to work harder.
4. Learning Games
Now that we’ve found various ways to grab the students’ attention, it is time to figure out how to upgrade your courses to match their enthusiasm. The answer to this is Learning Games, an approach that’s gained a lot of traction in educational circles recently.
These games help make learning both fun and educational. More and more people are realizing its benefits which include:
- Increased motivation and attentiveness
- Better memory capacity and retention
- Improved problem-solving skills
- Enhanced hand-to-eye coordination
- Faster language development
They come in various forms, from puzzle games to quiz competitions. And because of their rising popularity, you can find a whole host of online learning games on the internet to play with your students.
5. Quests
Finally, we have Quests, which are fun and exciting challenges used in tons of popular games and they seem to mesh well in a classroom setting too. They’re usually in the form of an assignment, project, or any other type of activity that students can participate in to win rewards.
These quests transform coursework to be more engaging and informative while also subtracting the ‘intimidating’ factor from the equation. This results in students gaining a deeper understanding of the course material while readily solving these quests instead of stalling.
Things to Keep In Mind
While adopting these strategies is great, there are still a few things to note if you want to get the best results. You have to ensure that you:
- Explain the rules clearly.
- Cheer for everyone, not just the top ‘players’.
- Keep the competition healthy.
- Think of creative rewards like extra break time, class parties, etc.
- Track everyone’s progress and help out the ones who need it.
Gamify Your eLearning Site
Naturally, manually keeping track of so many points, badges, levels, etc will be a tough job however, if you use Tutor LMS for your eLearning site, then you can easily incorporate GamiPress, which is your one-stop solution to gamification as the plugin has the option to create and track points, badges, levels and more.
In addition to that, assignments and assessments can be altered to be more ‘quest’ like. You can design the question patterns in a narrative format, taking inspiration from the topic of study and letting the examinees answer from that perspective.
For instance, if you teach English literature, then you can get students to solve a quest from the characters’ point of view. Of course, this is simply one of many ways to implement them and you can use your creativity to make it as fun and informative as possible.
Lastly, there are various online learning games you can play during live classes including Quizizz, Kahoot, etc. For more information on these, check out this article.
Summary
So this was our list of the most effective gamification strategies to level up your eLearning site. Gamification is a useful approach and if you want to increase student engagement and participation, this is your answer.
We always look forward to your comments so feel free to write to us below if you have any queries or suggestions. We hope you found this article helpful and until next time, Goodbye!
