Gamification in learning:
Benefits And Examples

We all love games. We all play them.

It seems there are exceptions. You can be absolutely against all these PC and mobile games. You can hate sports games. Furthermore, you can even forbid yourself to play in your daily life, behaving only following strict rules, despite I doubt that it would be beneficial. But even so, you play games. Because we are hardwired for that.

No matter when and how, as long as we’re humans, gamification in online learning will always work if you manage to avoid pitfalls and organize everything properly. We’re going to explore how and see the examples of successful implementations. Many well-known companies, from Google to McDonald's, use this approach to improve their employees’ skills and compliance with corporate practices.

We play games in our everyday lives when we follow some rules and try to reach something searching for rewards, and as you’ll see, such behavior is hardwired in our brain’s dopamine reward system. Learning gamification fits this pattern, so we become engaged quickly and often cannot stop. Those of us who use Duolingo for language learning know that very well.

Let’s start from the beginning and explore in detail how gamification works.

When we decide what we’ll do, cooperate with others, compete with others, pursue our goals, defeat competitors, and engage in relationships, we play strategic games where we can win or lose. We should follow certain rules, and all situations have their own. We can obtain some reward in case of winning, be it money, pleasure, or a simple feeling of satisfaction, and we’ll certainly be discouraged when losing too often. If you’re used to being very serious and following strict rules, it’s your game strategy that you, for some reason, believe to be the most efficient.

And we want to be motivated.

Let’s see some gamification learning examples from well-known companies to understand how it works. You’ll see how large were their benefits!

So, gamification is important from all sides. Let’s dive deeper now.

You don’t want to create a game? If not, then the latter isn’t for you.

Gamification and game-based learning are very different approaches, even despite sounding similar. Gamification, as you’ve seen, includes introducing gaming elements into curricular activities, increasing interactivity, and ensuring deep engagement, often several times higher than without it. It requires some game elements that we’ll review shortly, and then see how various learning management tools enable their realization. For game-based learning, you need to develop a game, be it a computer, smartphone, board, or social one, and connect its with your work activities.

So, establishing gamification-based learning will be much easier and good for everyone, you only need to build a proper model. It depends on the median portrait of your employee, as well as their job responsibilities and personal interests and desires. The 40–to–50–year employees of a jewelry factory and 20–to–30–year sales team members have different aims and, usually, personalities.

So, we need to customize it, but how?

Let’s learn. Park & Kim article, where more than 700 gamification cases are studied, provides a good background for further examination.

What will be your reward?

That’s a recursive question here. Because gaming is what directly influences our reward systems. The gamification of learning is the most efficient way to deploy our intrinsic motivation. And all the following benefits will belong to you.

Can there be drawbacks and pitfalls to the gamification of online learning deployment? The dark side of gamification, as described in the review of Callan et al., can reduce its potential greatly and cause even more problems. However, there are clear reasons for them, which can be summarized in three categories. By indicating them, you’ll be able to build an efficient gamification strategy, avoiding pitfalls.

Collecting the benefits and avoiding drawbacks are the two most important elements of a successful gamification strategy. Now, we’ll focus on the software where you’ll realize it.

So, you need to gamify your corporate learning program, and while you don’t need to develop your own game for that, you certainly need a learning management system (LMS) to host your learning materials. The learning management system's gamification features may be very different, but all of them are connected with a motivational toolkit. Let’s discover them!

To choose among the wide variety of gamification learning apps, focus on your staff characteristics. What do they want, what do they find acceptable and unacceptable, and what are their attitudes toward various activities? Answering these questions, you’ll understand whether you need a fully gamified learning environment or just some interactive course elements.

CleverLMS, for example, enables you to reward learners with badges and scores, and using their scores, they can buy gifts in the corporate store that you can organize. It is designed Other tools may be more leaned toward gamification, with bright interfaces or active social interactions.

Choose the right one. And good luck!