Top Gamification Techniques to Enhance Your E-Learning

E-learning gamification adds game elements, such as challenges, levels, points, badges and instant feedback, to online courses. It turns passive learners into active ones, so more students complete the course and remember what they learned. It works when the game serves the learning goal and fits the audience, not as pure entertainment.

Key takeaways

• Gamification brings challenges, levels, points, badges and instant feedback into online courses, which makes learners active.
• Gamified courses see better completion rates, with higher retention and recall.
• To gamify a course, start from its objective and audience, then build a guided learning path, a progress dashboard and rewards.
• Five techniques stand out: immersive AR and VR, role-play avatars, microlearning, personalization and intrinsic motivation design.
• For TechTrek, QPSoftware designed a game-based ecosystem of weekly missions, where each student creates an avatar.

The idea of gamification applied to e-learning can be somewhat misleading. Games and serious learning are two concepts that usually do not go together well. We may easily brush off the idea, believing that games are only suitable to teach children or low-skilled learners, and that serious or corporate learning needs a classic approach.

However, experience has revealed that gamification applied to online courses makes the learning process much more effective and productive, even in areas where a playful approach would be considered unusual.

For example, a 2019 TalentLMS survey found that 89% of the employees surveyed believed they would be more productive if their work was more gamified.

Prestigious organizations such as Adobe, Ford, eBay and NBC began to implement gamification around 2010, and the results convinced them to continue on this path.

These examples show how much the approach to learning has changed. Learners are attracted to methods that make learning more enjoyable without sacrificing the final results, and games applied to learning are now widely accepted, including to educate students with a high-skills profile.

However, adding gamification to an e-learning platform does not automatically make it better. This teaching method is effective only when it is relevant to the specific students and adapted to their needs. Gamification can be implemented through different techniques, more or less effective depending on the context in which they are used.

Which gamification techniques are most popular with learners and bring the best results? Below, we analyze five techniques to consider when you build your e-learning platform. First, a few words on what gamification means.

What Is E-Learning Gamification?

Gamification refers to the use of game elements in contexts where play is not generally expected. In e-learning, game elements and techniques help achieve the ultimate goal of the learning process.

For example, gamification includes challenges, instant feedback, levels to pass, badges, scores and more. Because these techniques generate a high level of engagement, more students complete the course, and their results are above average.

Why has gamification proved to be a winning choice in e-learning? Because people generally have an innate spirit of competition, and enjoy achieving goals, socializing and developing new skills. Gamification strategies use precisely these factors to motivate and stimulate students. The results of gamification steps can also be visible and shared with other users, which promotes a spirit of competition that motivates students just as much.

What Does Gamification Add to E-Learning?

You may have heard about the 70/20/10 Learning and Development Model. This model is based on a study of how people learn effectively: 70% of learning comes from challenging assignments, 20% from developmental relationships, and 10% from courses and training.

Gamification elements relate directly to the 70% of this model, as they let students test their skills in practice. Any failure motivates the student to improve in the specific area needed. The possibility to share results with others also covers the 20% related to developmental relationships, where students receive feedback and learn from the good or bad example of other students.

Based on the 70/20/10 model, gamification offers a complete and efficient learning experience.

Gamification also involves students more, as they take an active rather than a passive role during the course. What could be more annoying than sitting and listening to a lesson without being able to interact? This is one of the factors that weigh most heavily on the performance of students in a classic classroom, and at some point it even leads them to drop out of the course.

Thanks to gamification, students are immersed in the course and play an active part, which lets them see and tangibly test their progress. They do not learn in a theoretical way: they put their newly acquired knowledge into practice. As a result of this involvement, courses using gamification have a better completion rate, with higher retention and recall.

How to Gamify an E-Learning Course

To gamify a course, you need to gather and analyze detailed information about the course’s objective and the type of audience it addresses. This information lets you plan a gamification strategy that makes the course useful, instructive and exciting for students.

A basic concept of gamification is to create a learning path that seamlessly guides students from the first lesson to the completion of the course.

The gamification path must be customized. For example, at each step of the learning, the game elements proposed must suit the results the student has already achieved. It is also useful to provide a dashboard where students can quickly track their progress, monitor their results and identify the areas they need to focus on.

Offering the opportunity to earn points, badges or other rewards to encourage students is another important aspect of gamification. Similarly, instant feedback on activities generates a sense of achievement and helps learners continue their learning journey.

“QPSoftware designed a game-based ecosystem for TechTrek, where students learn about STEM subjects through a wide variety of weekly missions and challenges. This design decision led to improved motivation, engagement and course completion.”

Gamification must be fully integrated into the course. Every step of the game must be explained clearly and comprehensively, and students must clearly understand the purpose of each game activity.

It is important to avoid using gamification for pure entertainment. The game elements must aim at educating students, and should be included only when they are relevant and useful for the final goal.

5 Gamification Techniques for Your E-Learning Courses

Gamification techniques differ, and several of them can be combined in one online course. Here are five methods that have proven particularly useful to improve the quality of online courses.

Immersive Gamification for Learning and Training

When gamification was introduced, it mostly relied on very simple activities. Today, learners need more sophisticated solutions to get their attention.

Technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are highly effective in creating an immersive learning experience. These tools can engage all of a student’s senses, with a learning experience that involves both the student’s intellect and emotions.

These elements are particularly useful to increase student performance, especially when students need to develop practical skills.

Role-Play Avatars

Adding an avatar to your lessons is a smart way to motivate and engage your audience. The avatar takes on the role of a virtual alter ego, which brings a human touch to the lessons.

To be effective, the avatar must be studied in detail. In the design phase, you need to decide not only the look of the avatar, but also its way of speaking and its character. These characteristics depend on the type of students the course addresses. The avatar must resonate with your audience: it must be somebody they can relate to and trust. As an option, you may even let students personalize the avatar according to their preferences.

Once again, the avatar is not meant to entertain students, but to create a connection, and to help and motivate them throughout the course. You may use the avatar as the student’s alter ego, who has to overcome each step of the course. The avatar can also identify the student, show their progress, and make it easier to enter a virtual world.

In a nutshell, the avatar must make learning easier and become a reference point for the student. The challenge is to give the avatar visual and behavioral characteristics that make it look friendly.

“At TechTrek, every student can create their own avatar, which makes every learning experience feel much more unique and immersive. At the same time, students’ avatars interact and learn with the help and advice of TechTrek characters.”

Microlearning Gamification

Microlearning refers to the technique of presenting the material to students in small, bite-size portions. Microlearning does not diminish the quality of the course: it makes it suitable for learners.

E-learners deal with several issues, like lack of time, limited attention span or tiredness from looking at a screen. All these factors are discouraging, and they may hinder the course’s effectiveness or push students to abandon it altogether.

Microlearning aims at supplying high-value information that can be consumed in just two to seven minutes. Students can learn on the go or during downtime, and the lesson is never perceived as a burden.

Combining microlearning with game-like elements makes it even more natural and pleasant to absorb, and increases the retention rate at the same time.

Personalized E-Learning Experience

Even when students come from similar backgrounds, they still have specific needs and circumstances. A limitation of e-learning courses is that learners have to accept what has been prepared for them, and learn at the same pace as everyone else.

If you want to engage a larger audience and boost overall performance, personalization is needed. Personalized e-learning lets students shape the course to their liking and their specific needs.

There are several ways to personalize a course. For instance, a pre-test before the lessons may give essential clues on what content is needed, how to present it, and at what pace. Students may also make choices, such as personalizing the avatar, the duration of the lessons, the level of interaction, their preferred activities, and more.

Through personalization, students can decide precisely how to study, what to study, and at what speed. This approach makes the learning process more enjoyable and straight to the point for each learner.

Intrinsic Motivation Design

A major challenge for e-learning professionals is to generate intrinsic motivation in students. Intrinsic motivation makes the difference between the “I must study” attitude and the “I want to study” approach. Intrinsically motivated students study because they enjoy it and are self-motivated: their efforts do not depend on a reward or on an obligation.

Gamification plays a critical role in inspiring students. For instance, you can create activities that challenge your audience and test their acquired skills. Passing the challenge creates a sense of self-accomplishment, and failing it provides the motivation needed to improve. Multimedia elements and game-like activities are another powerful way to generate interest and stimulate the curiosity of your audience.

Once again, to generate intrinsic motivation, gamification must be relevant to the audience, suited to its skills, and related to real-world scenarios.

What Should You Do Next?

The gamification techniques in this article can genuinely make your e-learning platform more valuable and appealing to your users. Start with one course: define its objective and its audience, then pick the techniques that fit them.

The QPSoftware team can guide you through each step if you need help studying and developing solutions for your online courses. As an e-learning development agency, we designed and developed a fully customized game-based e-learning platform for TechTrek, starting with user research and a competitor audit to define its gamification model. If you have any questions or want to discuss your project, contact us, and we will be glad to help your e-learning platform grow.

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