There’s lots of evidence that gamification - the application of gaming mechanics and metaphors to non-gaming scenarios - is useful in securing employee engagement and getting learners motivated and invested in their online learning programmes. That’s what we use gamification for, anyway. Our Gamified Social Learning Management System, the Academy LMS, uses gamification to supercharge learner engagement and enjoyment. Find out more about what our Academy can do by taking a tour - just click the link below! But, in addition to creating online learning that knocks socks off, gamification can also be used in many other ways, from encouraging repeat business for supermarkets to boosting workout success. Let’s focus on one aspect of our lives that I’m sure we can all use a bit of help with: setting and achieving goals. We were luckily enough recently to listen to An Coppens - Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation - speak at the E-Learning 20-20 Seminar. She gave us some excellent ideas on how to gamify goals that we’re going to use here and expand upon. You can check out An’s presentation here, or click here to visit her personal website. Anyway. An explained that one of the reasons gamification helps to get us motivated and engaged is that so many of us are interested in games and play them regularly - in other words, many of us are ‘gamers’. 53% of gamers are aged between 18 and 49, while only 18% are under 18 (proving the ‘gamers are mostly teenagers’ misconception is just that!) and 29% are aged over 50. Clearly, age is no barrier when it comes to enjoying games and the gaming mechanics like badges, points and achievements that come with them. So it stands to reason that the effect gamification has on our motivation and engagement will apply no matter our age, situation or the application. Let’s find out more: Using Gamification to Achieve Goals An Coppens suggests that when we want to achieve something specific, we should frame the activities in terms of ‘missions’. These missions help to guide us along the correct path, and they shouldn’t be too long, tricky or complicated. Small missions will add up to big goals, after all. For example, say you wanted to improve your fitness (who doesn’t!?). One mission could be: "Run 3 times in the next 10 days." Once this mission has been won, you can move on: "Run 3 times in the next 7 days" and "Run one 11-minute mile." From there, your missions could cycle between length of run ("Run for 30 minutes" or "Run for 1.5 hours total this week"), speed ("All runs under 12-minute miles") or number ("Run four times in 7 days"). Can you see how setting little missions help us to move forward towards our overarching goal? These missions are achievable, simple, straightforward and quantifiable. You either achieve them or you do not. Once you can see what you need to achieve and how you can do it, it’s easier to stick to the goal and change your behaviours accordingly. You also need to implement some kind of reward or recognition system for when you achieve your ‘mission’ to keep you going. Some people will reward themselves with a fancy coffee when they hit their fitness goal, a meal out, or even put a £5 in a piggy bank when they hit a new personal best. Alternatively, you can hand over the tracking and rewarding of your goals to an app or webpage, such as HabitRPG to track daily activities, Fitocracy to monitor fitness gains or ChoreWars to make sure everyone at home is pulling their weight to keep the house tidy. Once ‘boring’ goals are turned into smaller missions and gamified, they’ll seem a lot more achievable. Nothing is beyond your reach when you can break it down into smaller elements to tackle one by one. What will you pick as your next mission? Read more about gamification by downloading our research paper below!  The post Applying Gamification to Daily Life Goals appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Long-term Engagement The aim of Learning and Development is to roll out training that knocks socks off and secures long-term learner engagement. But what it often achieves is a fleeting interest in the learning process that dissipates all too quickly, leaving a bunch of disinterested, disengaged and demotivated zombie learners in its wake. When we talk about engagement, we’re thinking about desire and behaviour. Do learners want to learn? Are learners making the effort to learn? Are they enjoying the process and doing well? Another way of looking at this is to consider motivation: are your learners motivated to learn or are they dragging their heels? Different Kinds of Motivation Generally speaking, there are two types of human motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something for its external rewards, like money, praise or something else tangible. For extrinsically-motivated people, it is not the action or behaviour itself which they like, but the outcome. In the learning sphere, this means that learners may not enjoy learning new things, yet they are motivated to continue doing so because of the promise of a payrise at the end of the process. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, drives behaviours that result in internal rewards, like enjoyment, positive feelings and happiness. It’s a drive to complete an action - in our case, learning - because of the effect it has on us internally. Therefore when people are intrinsically motivated, they have a genuine desire for the activity itself and enjoy it tremendously. When it comes to learning, it’s pretty clear that we’re all aiming to get our learners intrinsically motivated. Yet - you may see where this is going - we tend to extrinsically reward our learners (with remuneration, badges, kudos and promotions), which has been found to have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation. In an experiment to test motivation, psychologist Edward Deci monitored two groups of students playing a game called Soma. One group was paid for each puzzle they solved, while the other group played for no monetary reward. What Deci found is that Group A participants stopped completing the puzzles as soon as the experiment ended and there was no more money to be had. Group B, on the other hand, kept solving the puzzles even after the experiment was over. This is because they found the puzzles intrinsically interesting - the other group may have also thought this, but the extrinsic reward reduced their intrinsic motivation to continue. Click here to read part 2, or download our white paper on the secret of engagement! Parts of this article were previously published on eLearning Industry. Click here to read that article!  The post Gamification: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Last time we wrote about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and how extrinsic rewards can actually have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation. Here’s the second part of the story - how the extrinsic rewards of gamification can actually be harnessed to increase intrinsic motivation. Gamification: Extrinsic Rewards Gamification, as you may know, is the application of gaming mechanics and gaming metaphors to non-gaming scenarios. You can find out more about how to use gamification to delight and excite your learners here. When it comes to extrinsic rewards, gamification has it covered: badges, trophies, awards, levels, scores, points, missions, quizzes, leaderboards, ranking and rating… There is a cornucopia of extrinsically motivating rewards to be found on a gamified Learning Management System! And the evidence is there that gamification engages learners and motivates them to push on in their learning and development. But if Gamification is Extrinsic, What About Intrinsic Motivation? Those sat in the ‘gamification is bad’ camp say that gamification only creates extrinsic motivation, not intrinsic. That is, the learners focus on completing the task to gain the reward, rather than being creative to discover solutions. They say that employees that learn on a gamified Learning Management System will not be truly engaged, at least not in the long term, because they are only working hard to gain badges, points and achievements - and as soon as the novelty wears off, so will their engagement and good work ethic. Ultimately this means that the learners will not fully understand the learning content. A very serious criticism of gamification, no doubt. The people that believe this consider extrinsic and intrinsic motivators to be polar opposites, but really, they are co-dependent on each other - luckily, this means that gamification can indeed help to motivate learners intrinsically, thus securing long-term learner engagement. Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivators are Linked! In order for gamification to truly motivate learners, it has to target correct, intrinsically-motivated behaviours. The elements that are missing from most gamified Learning Management Systems are meaningful feedback and reinforcement for learners. Rewarding a learner with a badge for every little thing they do on their Learning Management System will not motivate them to continue once the novelty wears off (since in this case the rewards are only extrinsic). But rewarding a learner for achieving specific goal-orientated learning objectives will boost these behaviours. Want to find out more about gamification in online learning? Download our white paper below!  The post Gamification Increases Intrinsic Motivation appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Here’s an excerpt from our excellent new white paper, ‘Common Objections to Online Learning,’ which we wrote to eradicate any doubts you may have about taking your workplace training online! Grumpy Greta says: "Online sucks! It’s boring! I hate it!" Oh Greta. We’re sorry that you’ve had such bad experiences of online learning in the past. It’s truly sad that you’ve had to put up with dull eLearning modules, faulty technology and lonely learning. But don’t worry - that is now a thing of the past! We use a nifty thing called ‘gamification’ to make online learning much more fun and enjoyable. Here’s what this involves: we add gaming mechanics and metaphors to our Academy LMS to encourage certain behaviours. So when a learner opens an eLearning module, they get some points and a badge; when they finish it with flying colours, they get even more points! If learners share their knowledge and ideas with fellow learners, they’ll receive Achievement badges and a smattering of points. And sharing their progress on Twitter and Facebook? That’ll gain them a special badge! See? By gamifying the learning process, we make learning fun again. Forget what you think you know about online learning. The ‘Next Generation’ of online learning technologies has arrived to eradicate dull eLearning, and we’re leading the strike force! Grumpy Greta asks: "I heard that gamification doesn’t work with my employee demographics! Is that true?" Don’t panic, Greta! Research shows that 70% of senior executives play games (during work hours, no less!), 53% of gamers are aged between 18 and 49 and 20% are over 50. So where’s the evidence that gamification doesn’t appeal to your employees? When we gamify Academies we see a significant uplift (over 50%!) in learner activity and engagement. It’s impossible to prejudge who will be motivated by gamification - there are no barriers when it comes to age, gender, role or experience. If you’ve heard that gamification doesn’t work, it’s probably from companies that were using it incorrectly. Gamification for gamification’s sake - showering learners with badges for doing nothing much at all - won’t work. But aligning the gamification to the kinds of behaviours you want to see most certainly will result in more of those behaviours. If you want employees to work through eLearning modules more quickly, a ‘Speedy Reader’ or ‘Fast Learner’ badge might help. Or what about telling learners that they start the module with 1,000 points, and the longer they take to progress through it, the more points disappear from the total? That might help to get them motivated! You can download the white paper to read the rest of the objections by clicking here, or find out more about how gamification can be used in online learning to change behaviours and boost business success by clicking the button below!    

Gamification is the hottest trend to hit the online learning world in recent years - in fact, it’s also popular in a whole host of industries, from marketing and recruitment to fitness and financial goal tracking. Indeed, in 2011 Gartner predicted that by 2015, 50% of organisations involved in innovation will have gamified those processes. So the adoption of gamification and extrapolation of its uses into different industries shouldn’t been regarded as unexpected. What is unexpected, though, is how some organisations are failing to really utilise gamification in ways that will make the most difference to the company. Let’s look at some (fictional, so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings) examples: A supermarket has a bright idea to offer a reward card to regular shoppers. The more often they shop, they’re told, the more points they get. Each time they shop they swipe their card and some points are added to their running total. Sounds good so far, right? It must be motivational to know that for each pound they spend, they’ll get some points back. Except… It turns out, when they try to redeem the points, that they’re not worth very much. In fact, for each £1 they spend, they get 100 points - but when it comes to spending their points, £1 is worth 10,000 points. In order to gain £1, they have to spend £100! Any consumer can work out that isn’t the best deal available - not when other supermarkets offer better, clearer points and rewards. ISSUE: be clear about what points are really worth. They don’t even have to be worth anything physical - on our Academy LMS, points accrue to bring learners up to the next ‘Level’ (from ‘Sales Newbie’ to ‘Sales Star’, for instance). Being able to see how many points they need to make the grade - and how many they’ll get for performing each action - motivates and engages them to do so. Here’s another example. You’re told when you go to book a holiday with a travel agent that, oh wow, you’re her 1,000th customer! That means you’re entitled to a special offer: for £2,000, you can have everything in the £2,300 deal, plus free transfers from the airport to your hotel. Nice! You were going to book the £1,700 deal, but this one is too good to be true… Until you get on the plane and realise everyone was offered the same ‘exclusive deal’. ISSUE: when you’re using gamification, the rewards have to be worthwhile. They have to mean something - you can’t give every learner a ‘Happy Monday!’ badge every week, or a ‘Merry Christmas!’ badge simply for being registered on the Learning Management System. Rewards need to be specific, deserved and desirable. Who’d try hard to gain a badge that was basically being given out for free? Clearly, if you want gamification to work in your organisation or industry, you need to make sure it is tied to certain behaviours and is a reward for certain actions. Otherwise you’ll simply do more harm than good, turn away your customers and lose the attention of your learners. Don’t make the mistake that a lot of companies do who try to apply gamification functionality to their situation willy-nilly, with no real thought. Spend a bit more time on it, give it a bit more thought and you’ll reap the rewards. Want to find out more about using gamification in your organisation? Click the button below to access our white paper!  

We’re happy to say that we at Growth Engineering have had only good results from utilising gamification in our online learning. Our Gamified Learning Management System (the #1 in the world!) captures our learners’ attention and gets them loving the learning process once again. But, we’re afraid, not all organisations can pull off gamification quite so well… Here’s our light-hearted rundown of the best (worst!) offenders: Zappos: The shoe retailer thought it was on to a winner when it decided to gamify the review functionality on its website. Customers who left a review would gain a badge… which had no purpose. Honestly. Apart from maybe looking cool, it had no use - it conferred that the customer had bought a lot of shoes and left a lot of reviews, but apart from that it was useless. So what’s the answer? Well, if Zappos had aligned the gamification to a proper reward, their gamified review system might have worked. For instance, they could have said that 5 badges equals 10% off one pair of shoes, and 10 badges will give 20% off. Easy, right? Not only will they get more reviews on their website, but they’ll be more likely to get repeat business from these customers: they can’t give up the opportunity to get 10% off a pair of shoes - they’ve ‘earned’ that 10%, after all! Marriott: The Marriott Hotel Group did something… strange… on Facebook in 2013. In order to attract new recruits, Marriott created a game, much like Farmville. Users had to help their character run a hotel kitchen. They’d have to buy lettuce, make sure the chef had the order, and juggle all other kinds of responsibilities of hotel managers. It sounds like fun, except… it wasn’t. How exciting is ordering lettuce? Inspecting food to make sure it met the hotel’s standards? What a huge, costly mistake! Apparently, Marriott had intended to roll out more chapters of the game to focus on different areas of running a hotel business, but that never materialised - not surprising, really. Getting gamification right isn’t as simple as awarding points and badges for activities, or trying to create a game that revolves around a certain topic. There’s so much more to consider when it comes to adding gamification to an organisation’s strategy - whether it’s consumer, recruitment, marketing or learning. Find out more about how to get gamification right by reading our white paper below!  The post When Gamification Goes Bad… appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is the application of gaming mechanics and metaphors to non-gaming scenarios to make difficult tasks more palatable. Well, that’s our definition of it, anyway. But we realise that it doesn’t mean much to you as a definition if you don’t know exactly how it’s used, what it can do and why we think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. We figured that to help you understand why gamification rocks, we should tell you why we love it - and hopefully you’ll start to think that it’s pretty nifty, too! 1. Gamification makes learning fun That’s basically the crux of our argument to using gamification in online learning. When learners are awarded badges for completing eLearning modules and achievements for interacting with their Learning Management System, they feel happy. Rewards trigger the release of dopamine in the brain, which is the feel-good neurotransmitter that makes us feel, well, good! When dopamine is doing its thing we feel unstoppable, on top of the world and goshdarn delighted. 2. If learners are happy, they’re more likely to engage with their learning Rather than dragging their heels and rushing through eLearning modules as fast as their fingers can tap the ‘Next’ arrow, learners will take time to savour the information. They’ll be more likely to concentrate; to focus on what they’re reading, watching or doing and will be likely to actually learn more. 3. But they don’t just learn more - they remember more Our brains are much more active when we’re happy and engaged. As such, the information we’re learning about will become much more ‘sticky’ in our minds (rather than falling out like jelly through a sieve). The ‘forgetting curve’ theory states that if we don’t work to recall information, we’ll forget over half of it after just a few days. But with gamification, this isn’t so: the draw of gaining more badges, achievements and points (and thus reaching the top of the ‘leaderboard’) encourages learners to continue learning for longer, to go over the learning content more often and to share ideas with their fellow learners, thus reinforcing the knowledge. You could say that gamification is the glue that holds a learner’s newfound knowledge where it belongs: in their noggin. 4. Gamification is light-hearted Training, particularly corporate training, can be tough, dull and may seem like a chore. Even if we know that it will help us in the long run - such as set us up for a promotion or a pay rise - it can still be hard to find the motivation. Luckily, gamification adds a spin to traditional learning to make it more interesting. Picture this: the dreaded Compulsory Compliance Training email hits your inbox. You groan. You sigh. You beg, you plead, you cry. But there’s nothing you can do: you need to take the training. You set aside two hours to take the eLearning module and, with a heavy heart (and heavy eyelids) you begin, dreading the worst. But hang on… This isn’t actually that bad! Your little character is picking up points every time you answer a question correctly, and you just got surprised with a badge for sharing your progress on LinkedIn! You think to yourself, ‘I guess I was wrong about online learning. It’s not boring at all!’ These gamification ‘surprises’ make the learner experience a whole lot more enjoyable, which is good for the employee, good for the L&D department and great for the business. This was just a whistlestop tour of why we love gamification. If we’ve not quite convinced you that gamification is flippin’ awesome, check out the much more in-depth white paper we wrote all about gamification and what it can do for online learning within your organisation: Enjoy!  The post 4 Reasons Why We Love Gamification (And You Should Too!) appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is becoming quite a common term in marketing, eLearning, applications and even in the workplace. It’s one of those ‘simple once you know’ things - when you understand exactly how gamification works and how it is used, you’ll be able to explain it to anyone who’ll listen. But you know, they do say: "If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it." One way we test our knowledge is to make sure we pass the ‘Granny Test’. If you can get your grandparents - we’re talking 80+-year-olds, not spritely, techno-savvy 60-year-olds, by the way - then you’ll have grasped the idea completely. So here’s how we would explain gamification to our grandparents (or anyone not familiar with technology): Gamification Gamification involves taking the things that make games fun and enjoyable and using them in situations that wouldn’t usually be all that fun or enjoyable. So what makes games fun? It’s things like points, badges and achievements. The more badges you get, the further up the ‘leaderboard’ you climb, showing that you’re either doing better or worse than the other people playing the ‘game’. And the more points you get, the more of an expert you become. Here are the kinds of things that gamification can be applied to: Shopping You get points when you shop at the supermarket and scan your card. These points then tally up until you have enough for a reward - a free product or money off your shop. Sports day at school Children get points for coming 1st, 2nd or 3rd in a variety of different sports and games - whoever has the most points is the overall winner. This is more engaging and motivating for children than making each individual race or sport stand-alone. Hitting targets at work Gaining a monetary reward for hitting your targets is a kind of ‘gamification of work’. Leaderboards can show who is selling the most, making the most calls or has the highest customer satisfaction rating. This is motivating to continue working hard. Improving knowledge When it comes to gamification in learning, learners are awarded with badges, points and achievements when they go on courses, get good marks in their tests and pass with flying colours. The more badges they get, the higher they climb on the leaderboard, showing that they know the most. And these badges can even be gathered and exchanged for real-life rewards, should the teacher/tutor/Learning and Development manager wish to do so. See? When you think about it in these terms, gamification is actually quite simple! Want to find out more about gamification, particularly in learning? We wrote a white paper explaining all you need to know about gamification:  The post How to Explain Gamification to your Grandparents! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification plays an important role in the learning technology solutions that we create here at Growth Engineering. We utilise gamification to make the process of learning more enjoyable, to engage learners, to improve motivation and increase knowledge. But we also recognise the importance of using gamification to make the process of content creation more enjoyable for eLearning developers, instructional designers and subject matter experts. We’ve written about gamification a lot - how to use it, why it rocks, how to it makes your eLearning modules more fun and boosts engagement on your Learning Management System - but we thought we’d share with you 4 fab resources for gamification so you can continue your own learning journeys! 1. Gamification Co This website is the leading source for gamification news and information. Lead by Gabe Zichermann, Gamification Co is a one-stop-shop for everything gamification, from insights, research and commentary to podcasts and events all centred around gamification and its applications. If you’re just getting into gamification, this is a great place to start. Check ‘em out on Twitter too. 2. Gamified UK Andrzej Marczewski, web manager at Capgemini UK, is a self-confessed gamer through and through. In 2011, he became fascinated with gamification, which allowed him to merge his love of games with his developer mind - a match made in heaven! Andrzej writes a lot about gaming mechanics, motivation and types of game players, and he has produced a great deck of ‘Inspiration Cards’. Don’t miss a post by subscribing to Gamified UK’s newsletter! 3. Karl Kapp Karl is an author, professor, consultant and speaker whose tagline is ‘intelligently fusing learning, technology and business’ - and we couldn’t agree more! You might recognise Karl’s name from our GE TV section, where he spoke with Juliette about gamification; what it is, its applications within learning, and what the future holds. You can watch Karl’s video here but make sure you visit his website too (and check out the books he’s written!). 4. Gamification Nation Gamification Nation specialises in creating gamification design solutions that will align with business objectives. They work with anyone, from large multinational corporations to forward-thinking SMEs. If you’re thinking of implementing gamification into your business strategy, check out their website or get in touch. The brain child of An Coppens - an award-winning business coach, L&D professional and gamification expert - Gamification Nation’s usefulness doesn’t stop there: there is a plethora of information, opinion pieces and in-depth articles on gaming mechanics, solutions for HR, for L&D, recommendations and more. An also posts on her own website, ancoppens.com, and has written numerous books on L&D and training. Want to find out more about gamification? We’ve written a white paper on how it will help set your training and development programme soaring!  The post 4 Go-To Resources For Gamification appeared first on Growth Engineering.

When you create a piece of eLearning or roll out an online training programme, you probably don’t think about how much your learners will adore it; how they’ll be overjoyed and thank you for making their lives that bit brighter. Oh, no. In all likelihood you may be thinking about how to weather the storm, how to tackle your learners’ complaints and how to handle any push-back from them. But wouldn’t it be great if instead you just had to sit back and think about what a great job you’ve done, and plan where you’ll store all your awards? The trick to creating eLearning that your learners will truly enjoy is to never stop thinking about the learner. When you’re creating the eLearning, always consider what your learners will think about it. Put yourself in your learners’ shoes and don’t create anything you wouldn’t be happy to receive! Here are some questions that will help you figure out if you’re on the right track to making your learners jump for joy: Will your learners like the way the learning content is presented? Are there enough images on screen, or is it just full of text (yawn)? Does the eLearning module look like a slideshow presentation? How interactive is the eLearning? Are learners able to input their own information into the unit, and relate what they’re learning to their own work lives? Does the eLearning refer to the learner by name? Are there images? If yes, are they plain, standard ‘corporate’ images, or more exciting images that will capture the learner’s attention and get them interested? Would they prefer yes/no questions or drag and drop answers? Can learners relate to the scenarios in the eLearning? For instance, are they culture-appropriate? Is the eLearning broken up into bite-size learning chunks, or are you forcing your learners to enter into a 6-hour contract just to learn about fire safety? Is the eLearning appropriately tracked? If the learner’s computer breaks or the internet goes down, will their information be secure? Will their results be saved, or will their progress be wiped? Is the learning content set at the appropriate difficulty level? You don’t want to teach learners to suck eggs, nor do you want to try to teach them something hugely over their skill level. These are just a few of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself when creating eLearning: does it make your learners jump for joy, or drag their heels? To find out more about creating eLearning that truly engages and motivates your learners - and has them joyously logging on to their LMS - then click here to discover Genie, our game-based authoring tool!  The post Make your learners jump for joy appeared first on Growth Engineering.