Playing to Learn: Five Benefits of Gamification In E-Learning
Gamification in e-learning can benefit both young and adult learners by providing friendly environments for self-expression and immersive learning experiences in a wild scenario like business, team building, product awareness, community building and engagement but in this post, we will be focusing on e-learning.
Remember how that funny basic science teacher used to tell you stories and make you participate in lesson demonstrations, that’s what we are trying to recreate digitally in the remote e-learning environment.
Gamification in e-learning is meant to recreate the sense of fun, delightful challenges and exciting experiences while learning and practicing new things.
According to financesonline, the gamification market size is expected to grow from $6.8 billion in 2018 to an impressive high of $40 billion by 2024.
5 Benefits of Gamification in e-Learning
1. Improved learning environment.
A key reason of gamification is to simulate similar real-life scenarios for the students to learn through challenges. This leads to a more engaged learning experience. Understanding and retention is enhanced as students don’t need to learn in abstraction but in connection with peers taking challenges they are already used to like winning digital currencies that offers them an enhanced experience on the platform.
2. Better learning experience.
Creating a learning environment where cartoon characters can interact with the young learners by using their nick names while cheering them on would offer them a great dose of fun while learning. This can increase the recall and retention rate as playing with other family members could easily remind them of the experience they have on the platform.
3. Prompting behavioral change.
The impact of interactive computing has greatly contributed to the change in how we interact with some tech products on our phones especially social media and instant messaging apps. The use of Points, badges, and leader boards is great for gamification but there is more than just those surface rewards. Gamification can help engineer behavioral change especially when combined with the Fogg’s model of Behavior design.
4. Wide range of Application.
Gamification techniques can be applied to a wide range of learning needs including remote schooling, educational community engagement, induction and on-boarding, awareness creation, product sales, , soft skills, customer support and compliance.
5. Positive Impact on bottom-line.
Now we get to the money, how does this help the bottom-line? Gamification and interactive computing have contributed to the massive growth of companies like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and most of the household name apps on our phones. With higher engagement and better customer loyalty, organizations will experience a rise in revenue and profitability.
Conclusion
There is a saying that goes - sell as though you ain’t selling. If your students are conscripted into the strict “learning” conditions then its not gamified.
In today’s world where our brains have so much fun at almost no extra cost through technology, anything that alienates that experience is to be avoided. This culture calls for a new way of doing so many things including learning.
If we must learn faster, spend more time doing so, remember faster and more things, there is definitely a need for a fun way of doing it.
Not saying that we have to be dancing while learning but it has to be at least liked by our happy brains.
