We all know how gamification can help motivate learners to actively participate in whatever your elearning program can offer. Games make anything more fun and by incorporating this in your course, you can expect a boost in both interaction and retention.
While the idea of gamification can seem intimidating, there are ways to incorporate this in your course even without much technical knowledge. Some people forego the use of gamification because they think that it is very difficult to implement. Well, it does not have to involve a complex simulation. It can be as simple as using badges.
In elearning, badges are something that you can award learners every time they accomplish a task or complete a milestone in your course. One of the qualities of a great elearning program is segmentation. You do not want to shove all the learning at one time. For each segment, you can assign a badge that the learner can earn. Or, you can assign a badge for every task or activity incorporated in the lesson.
There are many benefits to using a badge in your course. Here are some of them.
- Motivation. The pursuit of acquiring badges can be a great motivation to pay attention to the course. The activities that you will create should incorporate the key concepts in the lesson. With the chance of earning badges dangling in front of your learners, they will put in more effort to complete the course and do it with excellence. You can even use social media to show who among the learners have earned the most badges. That should make things more competitive and in essence, motivating.
- Grading system. The badges that you will assign in the course can also be your measuring tool to see if the learner passed or not. For instance, if you have a total of 25 badges throughout the course, you can instruct learners to have at least 20 badges to pass. Anything lower and they fail or they have to repeat the course.
- Assessment tool. A badge can also be an assessment tool of sorts. If your learners are having a hard time earning a badge for a particular lesson, you can take a look at the difficulty level of that segment and reassess it. Not only that, by knowing the requirements needed to acquire a badge, you, as the instructor, can easily coach learners who failed to get a particular badge. This will make feedbacks faster and thus make the learning process easier.
- Chance to master a concept. Apart from helping you identify which parts of the elearning course is difficult to understand, it allows your learners to identify the lessons that they need to get back to. Mastery of the course is important and using the badge to help with that can be done in various ways. For instance, you can use a badge as a prerequisite for the next part of the course. This will give you the assurance that everyone who got to the end was able to master all areas of the elearning program.
In gamification, badges are actually one of the easiest to implement in your elearning course. It does not have to be something that requires too much technical knowledge to complete.
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