Learning through digital mediums. That is great progress in terms of training methods for organizations. Today, the trend is more about games for learning, and how they enable training managers to make their learning simulations interactive for learners.
In this article, we will cover the basics in games for learning, and how they can help you achieve better results in corporate training.
Depending on the size of your company, setting up a whole classroom training program can be a hustle. Often, attendees have to reach the headquarters, forcing them to travel all around the world to get to the right place. Chances are that these travel costs will be supported by the company.
Hence, you have to take into account other additional costs, such as:
These are only financial aspects of classroom training. But there are more criteria to take into account.
First, traveling is exhausting. Employees will have to deploy a lot of energy in order to reach the classroom training, to retain the information, etc. On a short-term basis, it is counter-productive: While workers are training, they are not really working or creating value for the organization. They are just getting better and/or acquiring a new skill.
Fortunately, one phenomenon has changed the rule of corporate training forever: Digital learning.
Indeed, being able to create games for learning is a huge thing. You do not have the logistical and catering constraints listed previously. All you have to do is making a one-time investment, in order to do your serious game development and create your serious games.
That is the beautiful aspect of eLearning: Allowing your employees to learn any skills, whenever they want, wherever they want.
A common misconception about games for learning is that they are complicated to set up and time-consuming. 10 years ago, this was the case. The lack of authoring tools was forcing you to contract with an eLearning agency, that could design serious games for you.
First, it was complicated, because you had to write the technical specifications of your project. Second, it was expensive, because you were consuming external resources to make your serious game development.
Nevertheless, with new serious game authoring tools, serious game design has never been easier. For instance, with ITyStudio, it is possible to create your first serious games within 10 days.
Actually, except pedagogical engineering, there are no specific skills required. Everything works with drag and drop or right click systems.
As stated previously, eLearning has really changed the training approach in companies.
However, even if classical eLearning modules are great to spread information, there is room for improvement concerning the assessment and interaction part of the process. During a quiz, a learner can easily get a great score just by retaining the right sentences to select.
That is when games for learning come into play. Thanks to eLearning games, interaction can go to the next level. By immersing your learners into a real situation, they are directly put in front of situations they could face in their work life. If they retain the right decisions to make in a given situation, then we can say that they learned more than a sequence of sentences: They learned a true skill.
Often, you can see employees that are disappointed and bored to attend training. And this is not because of the subject itself: Everyone wants to learn new things. Usually, this is more about the way knowledge is presented to learners.
With games for learning, this is a whole new story. First, the notion of the game is important, because it brings challenge and fun into the table. We often talk about gamification.
Besides, you can go further. You can, for instance, set a system of badges, which would be obtained by the learners with the best scores.
You can also organize a kind of contest within the organization, and offer a nice gift to learners obtaining the best score.
Also, playing a game to learn a new skill is often appreciated by employees, and thus enhance their engagement rate. This is an important point. You can setup the best learning program of the world, if workers do not participate in it, you will not get any results.
In this article, we went through the main elements to know about games for learning.
If you feel concerned and see potential in this training method, you should definitely give ITyStudio a try!
This eLearning games authoring tool contains all the features needed to implement the elements listed previously.
It is easy to use, it is engaging, and, best of all: You can try it for free!