Gamification In LMS And Specifically In TalentLMS
As any experienced instructor can tell you, setting up your eLearning courses is only half the battle. The other half is, of course, getting your students to pay attention.
Unfortunately, attention is a limited resource and we all have myriads of things competing for it (stuff we need to do, email, games, social media, etc.). This means that having a well written course is not enough.
What we need is user engagement.
Not the kind that involves diamond rings and promises of love; rather the one that makes them pay attention and eagerly consume their course material.
In this article we'll examine one of the best techniques that the eLearning industry has developed in order to increase user engagement: Gamification. In other words, making lessons feel less like chores and more like Candy Crush. Or Super Mario, if you're old enough to remember that.
The neologism “gamification” means the act of making something (in our case eLearning) more game-like, engaging, and fun, by introducing some elements of play into it. Gamification techniques have been applied to all kind of websites and services, including Facebook, Foursquare, Amazon, and StackOverflow. For example anything involving earning points or “unlocking” extra features (e.g. for participating more heavily in a social site), is an example of gamification in action.
When it comes to eLearning gamification, TalentLMS integrates some of the more well-known and battle-tested techniques, such as Points, Badges, Levels, Leaderboards, and Rewards.
Let's have a look at what these are, and how TalentLMS implements them.
1. Points.
Points are the most basic form of gamification; the exact equivalent of “keeping score” in a game. You might be wondering why you'd need to use Points for this, since TalentLMS already has Grades, but the two serve different purposes.
While grades are meant to measure academic performance, points can be used to encourage user engagement in general (e.g. by being awarded when one completes a course, for each login to the Learning Management System, etc). TalentLMS lets you fully configure the occasions in which points are awarded. Users are informed of the points they receive via a non-intrusive popup message and can check their total tally at anytime in the header.
2. Badges.
You can think of Badges as the equivalent of real world medals. In TalentLMS, as in most gamification systems, badges are visual stamps (images) that are awarded to users on certain achievements and are displayed in their header and profile page. The badging system features 8 categories, with each category offering 8 levels of badges, and has been designed to make acquiring badges increasingly difficult as the user progresses (to keep the whole thing interesting).
Badges in TalentLMS are compatible with Mozilla’s OpenBadges initiative, and administrators are also given the option customize all of the badge icons and descriptions.
3. Levels.
Levels are like ranking up in the army or getting a promotion at work. In TalentLMS all users start at level 1 and progress from there, and getting to a higher level makes more courses available (courses unavailable to a user because of level restrictions are shown with a “Unlocked on level X” label).
Again, TalentLMS administrators can configure the minimum level needed for unlocking any particular course, and set the rules for progressing into higher levels.
4. Leaderboards.
Leaderboards is just a gamification name for a “high score” list. A TalentLMS leaderboard is basically a webpage that offers a visual depiction of the user's ranking under various metrics (Points, Badges, Certifications, etc.) compared to fellow learners; including the very best (“high scores”) and others immediately above and below them.
The idea here is to give users a good overview of their position compared to others, so that they get motivated to improve it.
5. Rewards.
Last but not least, TalentLMS offers Rewards. Unlike other gamification elements that are mostly symbolic, rewards involve actually, err, rewarding the users for their engagement, e.g. by giving them a discount, some special offer, etc.
Currently the TalentLMS rewards system only offers discounts, but there are several ideas for new kinds of rewards floating about.
With TalentLMS Gamification Means Business
In this article we had a look at gamification in general, and the gamification options offered by TalentLMS in particular.
With its focus on ease of use and intuitiveness, TalentLMS makes adding gamification to your eLearning as easy and transparent as possible, while still maintaining quite a lot of customization options and flexibility under the hood (configurable rules, customizable icons, etc.).
Visit https://www.talentlms.com/ to take TalentLMS for a test drive today.