6 Easy Ways to Add Gamification to Your Learning Structure

Engage Employees with Learning Gamification

One of the biggest challenges of administering effective learning is assuring that it is interactive and engaging for users. In this article, you will learn the scientific and tangible reasons why adding gamification elements to your learning boosts employee engagement and enhances the comprehension of your learning content.

Gamification and the Brain

When it comes to learning, you might not immediately think of “fun and games”. But that’s exactly what learning can be by incorporating a few gamification elements into educational content. And though some might worry this will take away from learning efficiency, the opposite is actually true.

In short, gamification is an approach to learning and training that adds game elements to your typical content. Adding these types of interactive and entertaining aspects to learning and training creates a more enjoyable experience.

The Science Behind Games

The act of participating in these amusing activities has a lot to do with how our brain processes information. Games activate the brain in a variety of ways:

• Playing games releases dopamine, a pleasure neurotransmitter that boosts our capacity for attention and learning
• Gameful activities stimulate the hippocampus, which contributes to how we acquire and store new skills and information
• Receiving rewards from games triggers the release of serotonin, a mood-boosting neurotransmitter that decreases stress and anxiety
• When getting the sense of winning a game, endorphins are released which are the brain’s natural painkillers, which are also critical for focused learning and developing a sense of achievement

Cognition Meets Collaboration

Games are also often associated with more collaborative and social learning, which has been shown to decrease inflammation and oxidative stress on the brain, allowing the mind to stay more engaged and focused. 

Aside from the wealth of biological and neurological rewards from games, there are even more tangible benefits that gamified learning has on individual development.

The Benefits of Gamifying Learning

Based on the information above, you can begin to see the various benefits that can come from incorporating more gamified content into your learning programs.

Aside from offering learners increased “good-feeling” brain chemicals, using gamification to build your learning content can have a host of workplace benefits:

• Adds fun and interaction to increase engagement
• Supports healthy stream of learning motivation
• Offers real-time feedback for learners to improve
• Boosts overall learning effectiveness
• Enhances memory and retention of information

For these reasons and more, companies are looking to incorporate more engaging, gamified content into their learning and training programs. And naturally, learning managers are investigating exactly how this is done.

6 Easy Gamification Elements to Add to Your Learning

Adding gamification elements to your learning structure doesn’t have to be cumbersome of complicated. With the right tools, you can easily add a few aspects of gaming that can liven up your content. And this can help you secure the many benefits mentioned above.

Here are a few key gamification elements that you can add to your learning or training structure today:

Challenge Learners

Adding a sense of challenge is simple and is often makes an easier task less trivial. This makes the game more engaging and interesting for the learner as you encourage them to use more than their basic skills. Try mixing levels of content to make it more challenging to complete.

Foster Competition

Humans like to compete and play to win. Mostly because it releases those feel-good hormones like serotonin and dopamine. Having a space for learners to interact with gamified content in a competitive way can improve focus. Additionally, this can boost engagement, collaboration, and the release of those happy hormones.

Provide Instant Feedback

Generally, providing learners with instant feedback can be as easy as indicating “Correct” or “Incorrect” immediately following a quiz question. This instantaneous response allows learners to quickly discover their mistakes. This also allows them to apply that knowledge to future questions or development opportunities. When learners get evaluation in the flow of learning, their brain reward system activates, keeping them more engaged.

Create Leaderboards & Scoring 

Additionally, adding a leaderboard or scoring system are simple elements that enable learners to see how they are performing against others. This makes learning more social, and replicates the structure of most leisurely games. This means learners can relate learning to something more playful than serious or even unengaging.

Implement Rewarding Systems

Similarly, adding an element of reward can come in the form of an actual prize or award, or even a piece of helpful feedback. It can also be that the challenge or game itself acts as a reward. In any situation, adding a sense of reward and achievement can easily boost learner motivation and developmental resilience.

Encourage Mirroring & Collaboration

Lastly, mirroring means that a person or player gets to see how their progress compares to others. This is different than competition because it doesn’t necessarily mean the learners are trying to do better than the other. Mirroring is another way of encouraging motivation and social learning because it is done together rather than individually. Adding a mirroring element can look like putting learners in pairs to go over course content and provide each other with feedback on their results.

These are just a few examples of gamification methods that can be added to your learning content or training structure. Now, let’s look at how companies gamify their learning content with a learning management solution, such as Learn365.

Gamify Your Learning with Learn365

The Learn365 learning platform comes with a wealth of tools that enable more engaging and streamlined learning. The modern learning solution has gamification features such as leaderboards, progress dashboards, competency levels and point systems to drive learning and boost motivation.

One of the most multifaceted gamification tools within the platform is the Learn365 Course Creator, which gives administrators and educators a variety of options when creating custom quizzes that help engage learners as they’re tested on their understanding of the content.

The Learn365 Quiz Builder allows administrators to use an assortment of quiz question types, including:

• True or False: A question type with a true or false answer choice
• Ordering: A question that requires learners to place answers in a predefined correct order
• Matching: A question format that has learners match items that correctly correspond to each other
• Hot Spot: A question type where the learner must select a certain area of an image to answer the question accurately
• Gap Fill: A question that asks the learner to type in a keyword that is omitted from a sentence or statement

By using a variety of question types that provide more challenge and novel answering styles, you can easily bring a more gamified spirit to your learning content. You can check out this video to see exactly how learning managers can build these types of engaging quizzes in Learn365.

Plus, as Learn365 is integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of tools, learner progress is tracked and displayed via Power BI visual dashboards and shared with groups via the Microsoft Teams collaborative platform. This makes learning social, collaborative, and gamified.

Transform Your Learning Through Gamification

Adding elements of fun and games into your learning structure comes with many benefits for your brain and your business. Using a LMS like Learn365 can make the gamification process simple and intuitive. Plus, it gives your organization the necessary boost to enhance learning and training efficacy.

If you’re looking for more specific examples of how the learning solution, Learn365 enables companies to gamify their learning content, you can check out this Help Center Gamification article to see all the features and capabilities available to make your content more engaging and down-right fun!