What Businesses Need to Know about Gamification in Learning: Webinar Recording

Gamification has become an increasingly popular way of improving eLearning for many companies, organizations, and educational institutions. It’s no wonder instructional designers often seek ways to leverage gamification into their courses and content. Gamification is also substantive when it comes to corporate training, it’s a tool that makes make for better engagement and actual learning.

When it comes to creating such courses, designers are tasked with creating content that is not only fun and engaging but also clearly helps the user learn and retain information. If only there was a fund for designers who heard the term, “make it pop/jazzy”, it would be in the billions.

On May 5, 2022, dominKnow, in partnership with Harbinger Interactive Learning, hosted a Power Hour webinar called “What Businesses Need to Know about Gamification in Learning”. The event included four industry experts:

• Dr. Vikas Joshi, CEO of Harbinger Group
• Paul Schneider, PhD, SVP, Business Development of dominKnow
• Jeanne Bakker, Founder of Brain Bakery
• Vikrant Nene, General Manager, Capability Development of Harbinger Interactive Learning

Check out the full replay by signing up here.

Dr. Vikas Joshi opened the Power Hour by explaining the difference between game-based learning and gamification. He explained that game-based learning mostly emphasizes that it is a type of game play with defined learning outcomes (Shaffer, Halverson, Squire, & Gee, 2005).Gamification, on the other hand, focuses on achievement by using badges, points, leaderboards, progress bars, levels/quests without necessarily having the learner play an actual game.

He went on to say, that according to a survey by Finances Online, there are four preferred gamification strategies for adult learners:

• Progressing to Different Levels - 30%
• Getting Points/Scores - 27%
• Receiving real-time performance feedback – 26%
• Progress bars – 25%

These are tried and true methods that learners are the most familiar with and are not too surprising. Instructional designers may choose to use one or all four of these methods to aid learners process and understand said content.

Dr. Joshi went on to discuss the top priorities for corporate learning and development. According to a Brandon Hall report “Creating a Learning Strategy for the Future of Work”, in the coming 12 months, 74% of respondents would like a link between learning and performance. And 57% voted for having an improved ROI from learning. Such answers indicate that learning and development has gone beyond a mandatory compliance center and instead adds quantifying business value.

That begs the question, how effective are various methods of engagement? The same report explains that eLearning modules (38%), Microlearning (36%), and Learner-created content (34%) are slowly climbing the ladder toward engaging learners and achieving business outcomes. Give it time, say another 10 years, and these figures will most likely increase in an upwards trajectory and become more commonplace.

That said, eLearning and gamification is changing the traditional landscape and has a critical role to play. As time goes on, there’s room for new and different gamification learning methods.

In the webinar, Paul Schneider PhD., emphasized an example of how gamification can be directly linked to a real-world example in the workplace with a “Race the Clock” style of situational game. This example provided scoring with immediate and delayed feedback elements. Here's a clip of Paul walking through the "Race the Clock" template.

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Another example that was shared included a Drive-Thru Service Game that asked the learner to serve customers. Schneider noted that not all gamification requires every element the instructional designer team knows how to do, sometimes a simple example works for the audience as well. This example also included immediate and delayed feedback elements telling the story of a real-world situation, as shown in the clip below.
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Both examples were made using dominKnow | ONE. Just like the Drive-Thru example, this Music Pro! Ultimate Quiz game-show type example asks users to select answers before the timer runs out. This example was set up to send xAPI statements to an LRS if you have one (you can easily set up your own LRS endpoints in dominKnow | ONE).

Regardless of the content, style, or elements, gamification in learning has become a go-to method for most designers and is requested from upper management. Learners need to be engaged and what better way than elevating a course from pen and paper to a game with color, sound, and interaction.

Check out how dominKnow | ONE can help you with eLearning gamification

To make your own game-based learning content, start your free 14-day trial, no credit card required, and see how you can create in dominKnow | ONE. Get started with dominKnow | ONE, a cloud-based eLearning Authoring tool where you can create responsive content, share, reuse, and publish to any format.