When we talk about delivering learning experiences rather than plain old content we should be really focusing on using all of the tools at our disposal. Gamification is a fairly simple concept but the work involved in mastering the art of gamified content and interaction is extensive Put fairly succinctly, gamification is about applying gaming design and principles to non-gaming contexts.

A really good example would be the kind of work that Arctic Shores do with their Skyrise City and CareerRise tools in the psychometric assessment space. There have been questions raised about the face validity of such tools with senior manager and executives, but as long as the science behind them is rigorous then they can offer a rewarding candidate experience and improve engagement. Within Learning and Development, I became really interested in the concept because of an article posted by Shelly Osbourne on the Udemy blog at the back end of 2018. Throughout 2019 there was more and more traction in applying gamification to learning in general and I think the trend will continue into 2020. eidesign have a fantastic set of gamified tools to showcase.

But gamification goes beyond clever content design for learning materials. If you look at the simple elegance of GimKit it becomes, at a base level, about interactions. The social aspect of gaming cannot be overlooked, there are some great opportunities for group learning to take place which again can have a significant affect on engagement. The same can be said for creating a ‘competitive’ learning environment with things like leaders boards, teams or tribes. It is why at Expandify we highly value collaboration with content creators but do not narrow our view to only those with experience of learning and development We want to bring together great script writers, we experienced games engineers to create truly world class content.

Learning and development (and any form of eLearning) is really an ideal playground for gamification. If we are able to improve the interaction between content and user, inspire a mindset of continual learning and inject a bit of fun in the process then we know that engagement significantly improves. This helps to create an exciting learning culture. For me personally, gamification can help encourage community / group / team learning and therefore take away some of the isolation caused by a lot of learning platforms.

But just because we can use gamification does not mean it will always be the correct route to follow, certainly not in all settings and definitely not if it is the only way we deliver a learning experience. As we all experience learning differently, gamified concepts may not appeal to a section of users and as such alternative needs to be provided. There are trade offs to be made, but the key is to offering a tool that supports a variety of learning experiences designed to deliver the same outcome. At Expandify our drive is to create those personal learning journeys that all our users to experience the learning environment in a way which is most effective to them.

At Expandify we want to make a difference to the learning and development landscape, and with your support we can make that happen. If you like what we have to say then we are happy to chat through our vision. Our crowdfunding campaign is open so any share / likes / tweets will always be appreciated!

Thanks

Mark

As a slight side note, and for anybody interested, I stumbled across Alberto Mora’s dissertation which I really enjoyed reading: A framework for agile design of personalized gamification service