Gamification meets Learning and Development: a match made in heaven?
Let’s say there is a way to motivate your learners, make learning more fun, improve learner retention and much more. Would you like to hear about it?
Gamification, just a catchy buzzword?
As you can already tell from the name, ‘game-ification’ means adding games or game-like elements to learning content to encourage certain behavior. The behavior you want to encourage will often be ‘learning about a certain subject or mastering a skill’.
When you can make learning more fun, and include play, you can encourage employees to do things they otherwise might be reluctant to do. By giving virtual points and badges your students will start associating learning with positive emotions. Isn’t the human brain amazing?!
What’s in it for us?
Why would you implement gamification tactics in your learning strategy/LMS?
You can look at it as a snowball effect. Let me further elaborate.
When you create a healthy competition with leaderboards and quizzes you improve the motivation of the learner.
When the learner’s motivation improves, he or she wants to spend more time on the application or software that has a gamified element.
When they want to spend more time on something, they learn more and become more productive.
Besides these positive outcomes your recruitment department will also be able to attract young people entering the workforce (‘Millennials’, ‘Gen Z’). Most of them have been raised with fast-paced computer games as a form of entertainment.
Which tools can I use to get started?
Litmos, a learning management system, has included gamification to engage learners and motivate them to complete more courses to earn points and unique badges.
Here you can see an example of several badges with the number of points they represent.
A nice plus: you can customize the image and colors of the badge to your company’s preference!
The Leaderboard on the Homepage of the learner encourages friendly competition between colleagues. You can enable a Global Leaderboard and/or a Team Leaderboard. The more points you earn, the higher you score on the board.
Companies can make the decision to grant certain awards to the top 3 learners to further encourage learning.
SAP Enable Now, a tool to create e-learnings, has Counters, Collectors, Animation objects, Puzzles, Quizzes and many more options to gamify the learning content. For more information about SAP Enable Now click here.
The quiz functionality of SAP Enable Now gives the learner that extra push to pay attention to the learning content and obtain a high score.
Other advantages of using an LMS like Litmos or an e-learning tool like SAP Enable Now are the data and insights you can monitor. You can track the progress of your employees, collect feedback, and adjust their training program if necessary. This will ensure maximum employee development.
Conclusion
Whether you want to attract young talent or create a learning culture within your company, gamification software can be the answer. Gamification is not a passing trend, it’s a strategy to support a continuous learning culture.
Contact us for a live presentation & demo of Litmos and/or our SAP Enable Now solutions.
