Gamification of the educational platform has existed for decades now, to increase and encourage the learners’ participation and engagement

Gamification of the educational platform has existed for decades now, to increase and encourage the learners’ participation and engagement. It also encourages employees to achieve targets and get rewarded for, and has encouraged businesses and organisations to adopt gamification into their programs.

What is gamification?

When gamified elements or mechanics like score-boards, competitions and awarding are applied in a non-gaming environment it can be described as gamification. This term of gamification was redefined by Gartner in the year 2014 stating, ‘ the use of game-like elements to digitally engage and motivate people, learners or professionals’.

Gamification is not a new concept and people may have been rewarded with game-like cards for loyal shopping customers for a certain brand or coffee shops rewarding frequent customers. These offline loyalty cards encourage customer loyalty and could be similarly applied on digital platforms for educational and professional institutions.

How does gamification help engage and motivate people?

Recent statistics provided by ScienceDirectStudy in 2020, stated that 89.45% of students increased their performance with help of challenge-based gamification as compared to virtual training and lecture-based programs.

Since gamification recognises the learners or professionals progress and achievement it helps encourage participation and motivates people throughout the program. Constant challenges through gamification boost people to perform better and create equal participating opportunities. Since digital badges also allow the user to upskill and display their achievements for employment or career development it encourages users to participate.

Gamification for professional development:

Oftentimes in an e-learning environment, it’s hard to keep the learner or employee engaged and motivated. Training could be rigorous and without an eventful reward, there’s not much the learner could get from the program.

Through gamification of any program, learners are much focused to achieve the set target or progressing further into the program as they are recognised with a digital badge that will verify their competency in the skill achieved and progress made for professional development.

Gamification using Digital Badges:

Digital badges are low-stake credentials issued by organisations and institutions to reward completion of a training or assessment, recognising the membership participation and loyalty towards the association, acknowledging the progress made in the modules, rewarding attendance and so on.

Digital badges are backed with meta-data that help verify the legitimacy of the credentials and is easy to share, view, store and manage.

Gamifying training programs and course modules using digital badges will help the learner quantify their skills to advance in their career. For example, for completion of a course, the learner needs to progress through four modules, for each module, they complete they’ll receive a stackable digital badge representing the skill achieved for that module. Since each digital badge represents a certain skill or ability learners can be flexible with their choices of a digital badge.

Challenges of Gamification:

Gamification by enabling scoreboards or leaderboards can only work for groups but not for individual learners who wish to be proficient in a single skill. It is a challenge to customize gamification based on the structure and quantity of the program. Oftentimes mini-games could pose as a distraction and seem unprofessional, to tackle such problems quizzes could be added to enhance skills acquired.

Apart from that, it is crucial for organizations to issue a standard quality professional badge and not a pictorial badge for the users to share and display on digital platforms for professional development. Since pictorial badges don’t seem much professional it may minimize the impact of the digital badge acquired.

In Conclusion:

Gamification is the most effective way to engage and motivate learners as well as for professional development. Digital badges are easy to share and backed with meta-data that helps verify the legitimacy of the badge received. Shared digital badges on digital platforms create visibility, curiosity and create brand awareness. Although gamification has its challenges if taken the right way it could maximize the organization progress.