Securing learner engagement is often the trickiest part of your Learning & Development plan. You may be completely confident that your online training programme is the bee’s knees, but until you actually roll it out and see how your learners receive it, you won’t know if they are truly engaged. Engagement is really important - employees are 12% more productive when they’re engaged and happy, they take fewer sick days (3.9 compared to 10.7) and are consistently happy throughout the week, averaging between 94.7% and 95.5% happiness. The more engaged a learner is, the more motivated they are to learn - the harder they’ll try and the more they’ll persevere when training is tough. Gamification is one of the surest ways to ensure learners are engaged with their online learning. Not only does it make learning more fun, but it helps the learning content to stick in learners’ minds for longer, and encourages a healthy sense of competition within the learning group. All these things help to boost knowledge and organisational success. Today, we want to see what you think about learner engagement. Answering the form below will also grant you access to our super-duper new white paper, which explains all about how to directly align gamification with business objectives to make your training incredibly effective!  The post Learner Engagement Poll of the Day appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Over the past few years, we’ve had the pleasure of making the learning lives of thousands of employees much more enjoyable. Our Academy LMS - the #1 LMS in the world! - is built from the ground-up to be a delightful, engaging place for learners; gamification functionality makes learning exciting, and the social features encourage a deeper understanding of the learning content. Our Academy LMS has been successfully used by organisations all over the world, and we’re proud to have made a huge positive impact on the lives of so many people. As a company on a mission to provide learning to 10% of the world’s population in the next 10 years, we’re proud that our Academy LMS has been adopted by so many companies the world over and has made a huge positive impact on the lives of so many people. That’s why we’re so excited to announce that we have just taken on our very first Canadian client! Erickson Coaching International is the leading Canadian coaching and training organisation with over 40,000 graduates in over 36 countries. They have been pioneering transformational coach training and business leadership programmes since 1980, and we’re chuffed to bits that they love our Academy LMS enough to offer it to their students! As Erickson is focused on Higher Education, we’re going to be working closely with them to develop some specific education-focused features for the Academy LMS that will secure ever-higher levels of engagement and motivation. Our Managing Director, Juliette Denny, said: "Awesome! Erickson’s New Online Academy for The Art & Science of Coaching is a thrilling opportunity. We are excited to be focusing on the fast-growing Higher Education sector with a prestigious brand such as Erickson and are looking forward to making it a tremendous success!" Erickson will be utilising our gamification features on the Academy LMS - which was also ranked the #1 Gamified LMS in the world in 2014! - to apply a quest-like structure to their training to make the learning process more engaging and fun for students. Quests will be assigned for exercises, assignments and learning challenges to encourage learners to remain excited about the learning and progress further. Rewards like badges and points will motivate students, and Erickson will also be encouraging students to use reflective journaling techniques and blogging to reinforce the learning content. Marilyn Atkinson, Founder of Erickson said: "We’re very excited about our partnership with Growth. The breadth of the tools and offerings of its Academy LMS mean we can really enrich the learning environment for our students. We’re especially excited about the opportunity to offer interactive technologies which make the entire learning process more engaging and enjoyable." To celebrate the launch of the New Online Academy, Erickson and Growth Engineering will be joint-hosting an official launch event at one of Vancouver’s hot new venues, Steel Toad Brewpub and Dining Hall. Alumni, current students and graduates, partners, and trainers will gather to reconnect with the community, preview the New Online Academy, find out more about the technology behind the Academy and hear the latest updates from Erickson Coaching International on February 24, 2015. To find out more about Erickson Coaching International, click here. To discover what makes our Academy LMS so engaging for learners, click the button below to get a personal tour around the platform!    The post Announcing our First Canadian Client, Erickson Coaching International! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

It’s a sad state of affairs that all too often your employees will push back against any training you offer them. It can seem like an insult, sometimes, to suggest they would benefit from learning new things and improving their skills. "Aren’t I good enough now?" they’ll wonder. "Am I really doing so badly that I need help?" It’s a tricky situation to be in, and it’s very important to tread carefully if you’re going to succeed in getting your employees engaged with their training. Here are our top tips to making online learning matter to employees: Make sure they know what’s in it for them Only when your employees see how they’ll benefit from the training will they be enthusiastic about it. Change the tune from ‘You need to do this eLearning course’ to ‘Are you interested in improving your chances of promotion?’ and your workers will be champing at the bit to log on to their Learning Management System and take the training! Emphasise the important role they play Reassure your employees that they aren’t tiny cogs in a huge machine - they are far more important to that. In fact, they’re vital to the success of the company. Their contribution is massive - that’s why it’s so important that they have the correct training and qualifications. Encourage leadership We’re sure there will be plenty of employees who would like a leadership role, but maybe they’re not qualified for it, or there are no openings within the company. Marketing their new training programme as a way in which they can lead a team (a team of learners, in this case) can be very motivating for these employees who want that extra bit of authority. Assign them roles like ‘Academy Advocate’ or ‘Training Pioneer’ and encourage them to boost team morale and desire to undertake training. Work training into their progression We’re not suggesting you bribe employees by telling them that if they study X, Y and Z eLearning modules they’ll get promoted. Oh no. But tying training into job progression and prospects can be a very useful tool in securing learner engagement. For instance, let’s say that a Team Leader needs to be trained in first aid. Clearly, undertaking a first aid training course is essential to reaching the level of a Team Leader. Put another way, if Sales Managers all hold accredited sales qualifications - such as from the ISMM - then it will be clear to employees what they need to do to put themselves in the running for a promotion. See? There are plenty of ways to get your employees invested in their training - contrary to popular opinion, it’s not always as difficult as pulling teeth! Want to find out more about how to supercharge employee engagement? Download our white paper below!  The post Making online learning matter to employees appeared first on Growth Engineering.

It can be difficult to create eLearning to a deadline, particularly when you’re working with a number of people, and going back and forth between subject matter experts, eLearning developers and L&D professionals. That’s one of the reasons we developed Genie, our brand new game-based content authoring tool. Genie is a little bit special - in addition to creating really engaging, fun game-based eLearning, it also makes the development of eLearning a whole lot of fun too! Here’s how: TEAMS With Genie, up to 10 eLearning creators can collaborate on eLearning modules. You have control over setting your teams and assigning individuals to certain tasks. You can specify who has what power - Christy can be an Administrator, with the power to create new users and change settings. Alan can be a content creator, meaning he can make awesome eLearning but he doesn’t have control over other users. And so on. PROJECT ACTIVITY STREAM Ever wonder what your colleagues are getting up to - whether they have finished uploading the images, or completed the badge library? Wonder no more! With the Project Activity Stream, you’ll be able to keep up to date with all that your fellow eLearning creators are doing. GAMIFICATION Ah, a little competition is always good! Genie’s project management functionality is gamified, meaning that eLearning creators can gain badges and points for uploading assets, making slides and finishing the games. It’s super-motivating for them to receive rewards in this way, and it keeps them going - particularly if they see that their colleague is overtaking them on the Genie leaderboard! Gamification keeps everyone on track, creating eLearning at the correct pace and hitting deadlines as they crop up. REWARD CENTRE All those lovely points that team members pick up can be exchanged for real-life rewards in the Reward Centre. Being able to gain real rewards - like gift vouchers and extra days off - is very motivating. It shows eLearning creators that the more they put into their job, the more they’ll get out of it. FORUMS This is a great place to chat with fellow content creators. You can share tips and tricks, talk about the latest learning methodologies, troubleshoot, or generally just chit-chat about what it takes to create awesome eLearning! FUN FACTS We’re all about fun here at Growth Engineering (as if you couldn’t guess!). As such, we created the ‘fun facts’ button: click here every day to get your daily dose of informative entertainment! Whether it’s the fact that a chameleon’s tongue is 1.5 times the length of its body, or that lightning strikes 1,000 times per second on earth, we’ll have something to get you thinking! All these project management tools (and extra little features that make life more fun) contribute to a great working environment for eLearning content creators. They help to keep work flowing, ensure deadlines are hit and make sure that the eLearning that is produced is truly exceptional. And the best bit? With Genie, your content creators don’t have to be eLearning developers who know their HTML from their jQuery. Oh no - instead, they just need to understand the topics they’re writing about, upload assets, drag and drop items into slides and then ask Genie to create the best darned game-based eLearning their learners will ever see! Want to find out more? Click here!    The post Keep Your eLearning on Track With Genie’s Project Management Tools appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Back in 2014 we created Night of the Learning Dead, a comic book (and later, video) centred around Rodger and his disastrous belief that choosing the cheapest legacy LMS on the market was a good idea. For Rodger, things quickly turned from bad to worse: not only were his employees not engaged with their training, but they had turned into brain-hungry zombies! With zombie learners prowling the halls and trying to eat him, Rodger admitted his mistake - and the Fairy Godmother of online learning appeared to show him the right way to make online learning! The Fairy Godmother showed Rodger that good Learning Management Systems need to be fun, social and collaborative; only then will learners really enjoy their training. With Fairy Godmother’s advice, Rodger’s employees were cured of the zombie learner virus and were soon enjoying the process of learning. Hurrah! Check out one page of the comic below: Our Night of the Learning Dead comic book was such a hit that we put our pens to paper again. For 2015, we’ve created a new comic book: There’s Something About Genie! In this comic we meet Alan, an L&D manager, who is desperately in love with Jasmine from HR. He tries everything he can think of to woo her and win her heart, but nothing is working. Meet Al and Jasmine. He loves her - she has no idea he exists… Suddenly Al has a lightbulb moment when he hears that the HR department requires a new piece of eLearning. "Aha!" Al thinks. "This is my chance to make Jasmine fall in love with me! I just need to create a really easy eLearning module for her…" Does he succeed? Do zombies make a reappearance? What is that mysterious lamp that just appeared on Al’s desk? And just what will Al’s third wish be…? To download our free There’s Something About Genie! comic and find out the answers to the above questions, click the button below!  The post Introducing Our New Comic: There’s Something About Genie! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

We’re proud as punch to say that this week’s Learning Hero is none other than our brand new Canadian client, Erickson Coaching International! But before you cry "Conspiracy!" just hear us out. Erickson has been doing incredible work since 1980 - long before yours truly came onto the scene to help them create an exceptional Higher Education LMS. With over 40,000 graduates in 36 countries, Erickson has been pioneering transformational coach training and business leadership programmes for the last 35 years. And with a vision to ‘change the world one conversation at a time’, Erickson is well on its way revolutionising the way we learn about coaching and leadership. Erickson International was named after Milton Erickson, a therapist with a unique approach to therapy and a keen eye for observation. His idea that all behaviour has a positive, unconscious intent paved the way for what is now modern psychotherapy and forms the basis of ‘solution focused counselling’. Erickson’s ‘solution focused approach’ was pioneered and developed by Erickson’s founder Marilyn Atkinson, PhD, and has been tweaked and developed throughout Erickson International’s life. It’s a unique approach that integrates the profession of coaching with personal growth technologies - which means it’s a comprehensive approach that guides people towards a clearer understanding of their own unique path, and creates a framework to get them there. Erickson is completely focused on making the learning experience enriching for learners. Which explains why they chose to work with us to create their new learning portal, since our Academy Learning Management System is renowned for achieving high levels of learner engagement and supercharging motivation. In fact, Erickson have just launched a video to explain exactly what their new Online Academy for The Art & Science of Coaching is all about. Check it out below and see for yourself the passion that goes into everything Erickson do!  So thank you, Erickson Coaching International, for being so inspiring - the whole Erickson International team are real Learning Heroes! You can find out more about Erickson Coaching International here, or click here to find out about their exciting launch event on 24th February. If you’d like to see for yourself just why Erickson Coaching International chose to create their new programme using our Academy LMS - the #1 LMS in the world, as ranked by eLearning expert Craig Weiss - then click the button below and we’ll show you!    The post This week’s Learning Hero is… Erickson Coaching International! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

While online learning is without a doubt an incredibly effective method of training your employees, there will be situations in which you’ll have to supplement eLearning with some real-world training. Take health and safety for example. You can teach learners the basics online - what to do in the event of a fire, the correct procedure for a broken limb, what to do if a hazardous substances gets into eyes, and so on. But good luck teaching an employee how to give mouth-to-mouth without using a dummy! There are some things that simply need to be taught and practised in real life. That’s why we’ve made it really easy to combine online and offline training - the Classroom Booking functionality on our Academy LMS makes managing classroom training oh-so-simple! From the Admin side of the LMS, admins will need to select Content then ‘Classroom’ from the dropdown menu. From there, you can create and edit classroom bookings, invite learners to courses and even stipulate what learners need to have achieved before they arrive. This means you can set learners specific learning goals to make sure they arrive at the classroom event armed with all the facts and knowledge they need - which makes the classroom training a way to reinforce the learning and make it stick better. As Admins, you’ll be able to check who has accepted the invitation, what extra work they’ve done on their LMS to prepare for the event (i.e. what ‘suggested reading’ they have completed) and whether some learners might need a bit more encouragement to get them prepared for the classroom training day. Classroom booking and management via your LMS is also great in case any information about the event needs updating. If the date, time, classroom or any other details change, learners will receive automated emails to let them know. So rather than an Admin having to send a mass email to all learners informing them of the change - or a learner turning up at the original date and time and finding no one there! - learners will know straight away if anything changes. Finally, linking classroom events and online training allows organisations to bring technology into the classroom. One of the possible reasons that you deviated from traditional classroom training in the first place was because it wasn’t engaging your learners; online learning (complete with awesome technology, gamification, social functionality and so on) solved this issue. So the thought of bringing learners back into the classroom might fill you with dread: "Oh no, we’re heading back to disengaged, bored learners!" On the contrary. By combining online and offline learning, we actually gain the best of both worlds: the engagement of technology and the kinds of skills that can only be learnt in real-life training environments. Here’s how the process works: Create the training on your LMS: call it, say, Health and Safety 101. Assign eLearning units to the development stream - Fire Safety, Resuscitation and Calling 999, for instance - and then invite learners to the dev stream. They should start taking the eLearning modules, reading up on the subject, chatting amongst themselves and gaining points and badges to bring them up the leaderboard. Then, create the classroom event and invite learners. During the classroom training, tutors will be able to monitor learners’ progress, see who has done what and - here’s the really clever bit - report back on what they’re learning during the event. Tests and assessments can be created to be taken before, during and after the classroom training, to track how much employees are learning and how their knowledge is improving. Utilising technology in the classroom also makes it a lot more engaging and captivating for learners. In fact, we wrote a white paper on this a couple of months ago! Just click the button below to download it and learn about how important it is to bring technology into the classroom:  The post Managing Classroom Training from Your LMS appeared first on Growth Engineering.

When you love your job, everything seems that bit easier. Your days don’t drag, you don’t watch the clock, you bounce out of bed with a spring in your step and you don’t begrudge working a few hours extra here and there - in fact, you want to, because you care about what you’re doing. For those of us that feel like this, worklives are rosy. But if you’re missing the enthusiasm and can’t imagine skipping down the street to work, you need to work on your motivation. Here are five of our favourite TED Talks about work and leadership that will help to reignite your passion! 1. Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action "Why is Apple so innovative?" Sinek asks. After all, there are plenty of other computer companies out there. And why did Martin Luther King lead the Civil Rights Movement, when he wasn’t the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America? The answer, suggests Sinek, is that these people and companies act differently to everyone else. Ultimately, the companies and people who succeed most and lead the way know why they do that they do. They don’t just know what they do (‘make computers’) or how (‘building processors’ etc), but they understand why (‘to revolutionise computing, to make lives easier, to create portable solutions’). Watch Simon’s TED Talk below to find out what your ‘why’ is and change how you see your job.   2. Susan Colantuono: The career advice you probably didn’t get Susan explains that there’s a lack of women in senior leadership positions, and she wants to know why and what can be done to rectify this. "Why are so many women in the middle and what has to happen to take them to the top?" Susan explains that there is a missing 33% of the career success equation that women, generally, are lacking. Find out what this 33% is and how you can work to close the gap by watching the video below:   3. Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker Kare grew up ‘phobically shy’, so she spent a great proportion of her childhood simply watching and observing people. And she noticed something: there were two kinds of people. One kind was focused on gaining attention and recognition. But the other kind had a ‘mutuality mindset’, and they would talk in terms of an ‘us’ to include others. To truly be successful, Kare says, people need to work together. You need to become an ‘opportunity maker’ who raises others around you, who helps others to succeed, and who uses their talents to help others. Find out more about how to do this below:   4. Margaret Heffernan: Dare to disagree If you disagree with something at work it can be difficult to find your voice. You don’t want to cause trouble, be seen negatively, or cause issues which could get you in trouble. So what do you do? Margaret tells the tale of Alice Stewart, a doctor in the 1950s. She discovered evidence that the main cause of childhood cancer was x-raying pregnant women - which you’d think would be reason enough for doctors to continue this practice, but for whatever reason, they continued to do so for 25 years. In order to fight for her belief, outgoing and personable Alice worked with her polar opposite: a statistician who preferred numbers to people. And the reason their partnership worked so well? His job was ‘to prove Dr. Stewart wrong’. Only by failing to prove Alice wrong could she be confident that she was correct. It’s an inspiring story of the importance of challenging the status quo and questioning everything. Find out more about how to achieve this successfully (and not anger anyone!) below:   5. Yves Morieux: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify So many employees are disengaged and demotivated. It’s almost like that’ve checked out. Yves asks: "Why is productivity so disappointing … despite all the technological advances - computers, IT, communications, telecommunications…" Does a lack of engagement lead to poor productivity, or does poor productivity lead to excessive pressure placed on workers, which then results in a lack of engagement? In fact, Morieux suggests that it results from the basic pillars of management. Watch more below:   If you’re struggling to get your employees engaged, or you’re lacking engagement in your own job, we have a solution: click the button below to find out how gamification can boost engagement!    The post Top 5 TED Talks about Work appeared first on Growth Engineering.

We’re pleased to say that this week’s Learning Hero is Joey J. Lee, PhD, Research Professor of Technology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was a happy surprise to stumble across Joey’s work while we were searching for further information on gamification in education - though as soon as we began to read more about him, we were amazed we’d not heard his name sooner! In his own words, Joey designs, develops and studies ‘interactive games and technology for learning’. His current projects address real-world problems like sustainability, social change, cross-cultural education, motivation and engagement in classrooms. Joey also directs the Real-World Impact Games Lab at the university, where he develops games, researches motivation and games, and writes papers. In 2011, Joey and Jessica Hammer, Graduate Research Fellow, also at Teachers College, wrote an article entitled Gamification in Education: What, How, Why Bother?, which is how we came across him. In the article, Joey and Jessica tackle how gamification might be utilised to reduce the scarily high dropout rates at college across America: apparently, around 1.2 million students fail to graduate high school each year. It’s a shocking statistic and is something that really needs to be addressed: and gamification is the way to do it. Like us at Growth Engineering, Joey J. Lee recognises the role of gamification in engaging learners. When the topic is dry or difficult, something extra is needed to captivate learners’ attention and get them invested in the course. In the article, Joey and Jessica explain that gamification helps to create new rules by which to learn, away from the rigid confines of school rules - formal rules that include sticking strictly to the syllabus (whereas a student’s passion may lie elsewhere) and deterring any communication that isn’t directly related to projects. With gamification, if a student reads an optional library book which is related to the classroom topic, they can gain a badge or some points. This encourages them to continue reading around the topic, supplementing their education and expanding their knowledge further. It really is a great article! Read it here at Academia.edu. To find out more about Joey J. Lee and his work, click the links below: Joey’s page at Columbia University. Joey’s website. The Games Research Lab. Columbia University on Twitter: @columbia That gamification is the answer to the problem of engagement is something we’ve believed from day one, which is why we built our Academy LMS from the ground-up to be full of gamification features like points, badges and leaderboards, and why we’ve placed such an emphasis on social learning and collaboration. We work better when we can bounce ideas off each other, after all. Want to find out more? Download our white paper on how gamification superchargers engagement by clicking the button below!    The post This week’s Learning Hero is Joey J. Lee! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

According to the Bartle Test, a game player classification system, there are four kinds of game players - and therefore when it comes to gamified eLearning, eLearners can be divided into four types. The Bartle Test (you can take it here) is based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle. It’s a series of questions and an accompanying scoring formula that classifies players into categories based on their preferences and overall score in each section. Since 1996, the Bartle Test has been taken a whopping 860,000 times, and is still going strong. There has been plenty written on game player types over the years (check out Gamified UK for a fleshed-out version which expands on Bartle’s thinking). Here’s the basics of Bartle’s game player types: Achievers: win, challenge, create, show off, compare Socializers: help, share, comment, gift, greet Explorers: explore, rate, review, vote, curate Killers: harass, hack, cheat, heckle, Achievers These players like to feel that the task can be ‘beaten’ in some way, shape or form. You can cater to the Achiever style by giving learners something to accomplish and ensuring that achievements are visible to all. This appeals to the Achiever as it allows them the opportunity to show off their skills and prove their elite status to others. Explorers Explorers will retain rich memories about what they experienced during their learning and will often enrich themselves in anything they can find about the subject. One appeal of the visibility is that they are surrounded by people who will benefit from their wisdom. It is notable that they often feel restricted when expected to move on within a certain time, as that does not allow them to look around at their own pace. It’s important to give explorers the opportunity to navigate around their Learning Management System - and setting rewards like badges for doing so can be extra-motivating. Socialisers Their objective is not so much to win or explore as it is to be social, interact with others and make everyone’s experience more pleasant. The Academy LMS’s Dialogue Stream and Insight Groups are two ways to appeal to these learners, since it is a way for them to connect with their peers. Chat functionality allows them to welcome others, offer help and advice and share information. It allows Socialisers to develop new relationships. Killers These learners thrive on competition with other players, and prefer fighting and competing with them to working with them. The majority of Killers are in it for the sheer sporting thrill of winning. Leaderboards on the Academy LMS appeal to Killers, since they allow learners to see at a glance who is doing ‘best’ and is ‘killing’ the competition. Though it should be noted that only a small percentage of learners will be Killers. Want to find out more about how gamification appeals to each type of game player? Click here! Alternatively, discover how to use gamification to achieve business objectives by clicking the button below!  The post What type of game player are you? appeared first on Growth Engineering.