Not everyone knows this, but aligning gamification to business objectives is vitally important. There’s no point assigning badges for useless actions, or showering learners with points for displaying behaviours which won’t have a positive impact on the business. Aligning gamification to business objectives really is the only way to ensure that you’re motivating your learners to develop in ways that will contribute to business success. This is such an important topic that we wrote an entire white paper on it, called ‘Effective use of gamification in a business’. Here’s an excerpt of what you can expect if you download the white paper: Firstly, there are a few areas in which gamification can be used within an organisation: attraction retention motivation engagement productivity Using gamification within Learning and Development covers a few of these areas, from the more obvious (motivation, engagement and productivity) to less obvious. Gamification in learning helps retention because engaging learners enables them to develop in their careers, opening up more options within the organisation and showing them that the business cares about them enough to offer some really rather fantastic training. This is incredibly important to retain employees. Here is how gamification features can tie into business objectives: Levels are perhaps the most obviously useful way to align gamification with the business, as they allow you to tailor each learner’s journey to a set of parameters necessary for success. When learners first log on to their LMS, their journey is about discovery. They look around their LMS, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and try to figure out what’s what. Using levels in onboarding shows them how to use their new learning platform, what they need to do and what’s in store for them; the scaffolding builds their skills up to the height required for them to ‘pass’ that journey, and then it is over. But, importantly, the ‘end game’ doesn’t mean their entire learning journey has come to an end. Instead, each time they hit the finish line, they discover they are able to push on further in a new race towards a different end point. Say, they finish their first journey of ‘Induction’ and then unlock the ‘Trainee’ level. Once they pass this, they’re on to the ‘Sales Newbie’ level, and so on. Each organisation can set its own levels - as many or as few as necessary - and set how many points are required to ‘level up’ and move on to the next level. At each level, learners are given access to certain learning materials, eLearning modules, groups, downloadables and further reading. They cannot unlock the next set of materials until they have satisfied the criteria at the current level and gained sufficient points to level up. Levels are superb tools for ensuring employees are sufficiently knowledgeable to lead a team, gain a promotion or move into a new department. ——————- There’s plenty more where that came from - click the button below to download our white paper and find out about badges, points, leaderboards, how to roll out an effective gamification plan, and read the case study about how Game Retail accomplished all this!  The post Be More Awesome: Aligning Gamification to Business Objectives appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Ever feel like your online learning just isn’t working? You think you’ve done the right things and created the best training for your employees, but something’s just not right. Maybe it’s the topic? Is it too difficult? Or perhaps the images you used are a bit too corporate, or the tests too tricky to decipher? Perhaps the problem lies with your Learning Management System - could it be faulty? Maybe it doesn’t display correctly on your employees’ computers? Whatever the reason, you’ve taken the first step towards awesome online learning by recognising that yours needs improving. Hurrah! But we know you’re busy, and if you’re stuck with your current LMS provider for a while, you can’t exactly overhaul your entire online learning programme! So here are 5 little changes can you make to seriously improve your online learning, without ditching your LMS vendor right now (leave that for later!): 1. Improve internal marketing Can you expect your employees to be excited about their online learning if managers, the L&D department and senior management aren’t passionate and invested too? Certainly not! When you roll out a new L&D programme you need to make sure you market it to your employees correctly. They need to understand why they’re being asked to take part, over and above the obvious ‘to become better at their jobs and make the company more money’ answer! Marketing - in the form of email campaigns, meetings, conferences, presentations, videos - should show employees what’s in it for them. Why they should commit to improving their skills and making the most of the training that’s available. Why they should approach it passionately and with determination, rather than seeing it as an annoying inconvenience. Check out the video below we created to show you how to expertly market your online learning roll-out to your employees! 2. Gamify your training While it’s much more effective to use a gamified Learning Management System (i.e. one which has been built from the ground-up with gamification features), there are applications that can add an element of gamification to your existing LMS, such as Badgeville. Gamification will boost learner engagement on your LMS, though you’ll need to bear in mind that you can’t simply dump badges on your learners without a proper gamification plan in place. Read more about using gamification correctly here! 3. Link training to real-life rewards If your LMS doesn’t support gamification, then one of the ways to keep employees engaged is to reward learners with real-life rewards. It’s not the perfect solution (aligning gamification to business objectives within the LMS would be) but awarding a restaurant voucher or gift card to employees who do particularly well in their training can be a motivator for them to engage with their training. Though we should point out that this isn’t enough on its own! 4. Take a break If you’ve already rolled out your training programme and it’s proving entirely unsuccessful, then a hiatus can be useful to reignite employee interest in the programme. Close the LMS and put up a holding page saying something along the lines of, "Your new and improved LMS is on its way!" Behind-the-scenes work to add elements of gamification, change branding or alter the layout of your LMS can then be completed while employees wait to restart their training. Using tip #1, you can market this ‘new’ online learning roll-out to drum up some excitement. This way, when you ‘relaunch’ the LMS, employees will be more interested in checking it out and taking part in the training. 5. Evaluate eLearning Maybe the problem isn’t with your LMS, but with the eLearning units themselves. Take a step back from being an L&D professional and put yourself in your learners’ shoes: open up an eLearning unit and really try to experience it in the same way as your employees do. Would you enjoy this training? Would it excite you, or put you to sleep? Don’t be precious with it just because you created or commissioned the eLearning - be honest and ruthless in your evaluation. And if you realise that your eLearning is the problem, do something about it! These are just 5 little steps you can take that will make a big difference to your online learning training programme. We go into more detail about how to create an awesome eLearning plan in our ‘Secret of Engagement’ white paper - download it for free below and continue your own learning journey!    The post 5 Little Changes That Will Make a Big Difference to Your eLearning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is a hot topic - not just in eLearning, but in all industries and areas of life. From marketing to fitness, gamification is coming to the fore to increase engagement and engineer results. There’s plenty written about gamification (like here and here), but if you’re not a fan of reading, you’re in luck! We’ve selected five great videos that will help you get to grips with all things gamification: Extra Credits: Gamification - How the Principles of Play Apply to Real Life At 6 minutes long, this is a great, light-hearted approach to explain what gamification is and how it works in real life. Bonus: photos of puppies! Importantly, Extra Credits doesn’t shy away from the bad side of gamification - that there is the potential for misuse, such as through reinforcing negative or socially unacceptable behaviours. Check it out below! Gabe Zichermann: Fun is the Future - Mastering Gamification If you’re after something a bit more in depth, Gabe’s video, recorded at Google Tech Talk, is for you. At just shy of an hour long, it’s a fantastic way to get a deeper understanding of gamification and all that it can do to improve engagement and enjoyment. Gabe is a great presenter and it’s clear to see that he’s passionate about gamification. Grab a brew and watch below: Karl Kapp: What is Gamification? A Few Ideas You may recognise Karl from an interview we conducted with him for our own channel, GETV. In this video, Karl gets right into the nitty gritty minutiae of gamification. He also explains who coined the term ‘gamification’ and how its use is changing. It’s 10 minutes long - the perfect thing to watch while waiting for your dinner to cook! Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo: Sight [A Futuristic Short Film] This one is slightly different… If you’re anything like us, you’ll go from ‘Ooh, how cool!’ to ‘That’s a bit weird…’ to ‘Oh… Oh dear…’ Sight, a graduation project for Eran and Daniel, is a brilliant but somewhat disturbing film about the future of augmented reality and gamification. What would it really be like if everything was gamified, from chopping cucumber to going on a date? This video documents the negative side of gamification: Back to something a bit more academic now: Janaki Kumar: Gamification at Work [TEDx Talk] In this TED Talk, Janaki asks listeners to think about what it is about games that we like (competition? Feedback? Challenge?) and add these elements to non-game concepts to reinforce and engage. Janaki highlights the assumption that the opposite of ‘play’ is ‘work’, but she suggests that it doesn’t have to be that way - in fact, research shows that the polar opposite of ‘play’ is actually ‘depression’. So unless you’re suffering from depression (click here for resources on that), there is no reason why your work can’t be enjoyable! Anyway, check out the video below: We hope you liked our selection of gamification videos! After watching these you should have a great understanding of what it is, how it can be used and also understand any potential pitfalls that await incorrect use of gamification. If you do fancy reading a longer article on the topic, check out our white paper below on how to use gamification within businesses to engage and motivate employees:  The post Become an Expert on Gamification by Watching These 5 Videos appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Leaving your current Learning Management System to make the transition to a new, state-of-the-art, next-gen LMS can at first seem quite stressful. You might be wondering how you’ll get to grips with all the new features and functionality, how your learners will receive their new training platform, and whether it will be worth the time and effort to make the switch. It can help to think about the reasons why you’ve decided to make the change - because we’re sure the decision comes after much consideration and weighing up of various options. Here are a few reasons you might be choosing to move from a traditional LMS to a next-gen LMS, like the Academy LMS: You want more functionality Your old Learning Management System may have suited your needs when you got it, but things change. Maybe your organisation has grown, your business model has changed, or you simply have a larger budget now to splash out on awesome features that were previously out of your reach. Or perhaps your LMS is simply so old that all its features are outdated! Technology has come a long way in a short space of time - what might have seemed cutting-edge two years ago is basic and ‘as standard’ now. These days, you’ll want an LMS that is truly at the forefront of development; gamification and social learning features should be available, reporting should be a breeze and learners should be engaged with their training. Which brings us on to the second reason you might be looking to ditch your legacy LMS… You want to engage your learners Traditional Learning Management Systems often struggled with engagement. LMSs were seen as a vehicle of delivering learning content - nothing more, nothing less. All that was required of an online learning platform was to host content and allow learners to download files. Oh how things have changed! Gone are the days when an LMS’s sole purpose was to disseminate information. Now, next-gen LMSs like the Academy LMS are designed with the express aim of engaging learners, getting them motivated and helping them to achieve their goals. You want to improve your ROI If your current training programme is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, you’ll be wondering what can be done to generate a return on investment you can really write home about. Changing your LMS is one of the ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of your training spend - an up-to-date LMS that utilises all of the great functionality we mentioned earlier will set you up on your way to achieving an impressive ROI. An LMS with gamification and social features will engage learners, which in turn will get them working harder for longer. This means they’ll be learning more and improving their knowledge, which is something that will be obvious all the way to the bottom line. When an employee’s skills improve, so does their performance - and we all know an improved performance results in a boosted return on investment. Your reporting is a pain in the beehive Do you want more information in your reports than ‘Learner X downloaded Y’? We don’t blame you! You can’t improve what you can’t monitor, after all. Luckily, the Academy LMS’s robust reporting suite makes monitoring learner activity and progress a doddle. Admins can set up automatic reports to push weekly or monthly, can filter by department, location, and more, and can report on things as far-ranging as number of unique log-ins per month, time spent on the site, and even how many badges and points a learner has accrued! Being able to report on the gamification functionality on the LMS makes it easy to see just how engaged learners are. Picture this: two learners both complete the same piece of eLearning - let’s call it Fire Extinguisher 101. Learner 1 then logs off their LMS and doesn’t return until it’s time for their next piece of training. Learner 2, on the other hand, continues to explore their Academy after they complete the eLearning. Reports show that they joined the Fire Extinguisher group, posted 12 comments, shared 3 links and gained 2 extra badges. Whose knowledge and skills do you think increased more? Who would you put more trust in to put out a fire? We think the answer is clear! If you’re wondering about whether it’s time for your to ditch your old LMS and start a journey to the next dimension of Learning Management Systems, sign up for a demo of the ultimate next-gen LMS - the Academy LMS:    The post Next-Gen LMS: Why You Should Make the Change appeared first on Growth Engineering.

The 70:20:10 theory of formal and informal learning is an ‘interesting beast’, according to Charles Jennings, member of the Internet Time Alliance. In an interview with the Corporate Learning Consortium (view it here) Charles explains that while 70:20:10 is intended to extend learning and improve performance within organisations, it is just a scaffolding - a ‘framework for change’ - and companies shouldn’t focus too much on the specific numbers. Rather, the importance lies in ensuring a combination of learning techniques - both formal and informal learning ؘ- are used in the workplace to upskill employees. There are four main ways to learn, all of which are touched upon with the 70:20:10 framework: Rich and challenging experiences One of the best ways to learn is to stretch and challenge ourselves by applying newly-learnt knowledge to tasks that might be new to us, slightly above our skill level, or might be problematic rather than straightforward. Opportunity to practise Practising what we learn is essential to ensure it is embedded in our minds, not forgotten. Allowing employees the opportunity to put new ideas and skills into practice will benefit the employees and the organisation and result in some solid learning. Meaningful conversations How do you test if you really understand something, without actually taking a pop quiz or completing an assignment? See if you can explain it to someone else! It’s all well and good being able to select the correct option from a multiple choice question, but you’ll only know that you really understand it when you can chat about it with others. Taking time out for reflection It can be tempting to jump right into the next topic after learning something, but it’s important to take stock of what you’ve learnt, see how it links to other learning topics you’ve taken recently, how it can be applied to your work and whether there is anything you need to clarify before you move on. If you rush through learning topics in a hurry to complete training, you might come away with huge gaps in your knowledge. But if you take the time to reflect on learning, you’ll cement the content much more deeply. Those are the basic four ways to learn outside of ‘formal’ training, and you can see how they contribute to continued success. Indeed, it’s been suggested that the highest performers within an organisation in any field, within any industry, have a few things in common - five characteristics that reflect the most important ways we learn: 1. Mastery High performers master the basics in a structured way. They know how important it is to understand all that their role requires of them, and they seek out careful guidance to make sure they have mastered the basics. 2. Guided practice The practice that high performers do - i.e. applying what they’ve learnt to their roles - is carried out under guidance. They seek out someone more experienced to coach them through, keep them on track and guide their work. 3. Social learning High performers are embedded in the work ‘community’. They know what others are doing, they understand what ‘good’ looks like in their organisation, and they can learn from others to improve their performance. 4. Tools They have access to right tools and the right people at the right time. High performers have performance support at their fingertips when they need it - for example, they know they can call someone right now to answer a question, they know where to go to learn more, and they know have access to a suite of performance management tools to keep them on track. 5. Extra practice Not only are high performers guided by coaches, but they usually have had thousands and thousands of hours’ practice in the context of work. They’ll actively make the effort and seek out opportunities to use their new knowledge. It’s easy to spot these high performers. They don’t stop learning once the training is over, and they spend hours putting their new skills into practice - cementing the learning thoroughly and supercharging their performance. Are you a high performer, or do you recognise any within your organisation? It can be tempting to rush employees through training as quickly as possible to get it done, but since a large part of learning takes places outside of formal training, it’s so important to encourage these less well-known informal learning techniques. Find out more about informal learning and the 70:20:10 framework with our free white paper below:      The post 70:20:10 - Just a Framework for Change? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is a word that conjures up images of adolescent boys holed up in their bedrooms, empty cans of energy drink discarded on the carpet next to them, crumbs on their T-shirts, playing computer games into the early hours. ‘Gamers’ are often seen as lazy, antisocial, obsessive types. So with the term making us think in these ways, it is perhaps no surprise that organisations are quick to dismiss the adoption of gamification techniques into business functions. "It’s not for us," they think. "We don’t ‘do’ games here - we’re a serious organisation." But the thing is, gamification doesn’t really have much to do with video games. What gamification does is take the best parts of ‘games’ - the metaphors and mechanics which engage and motivate us to play them - and use them in other contexts to motivate us to change our behaviours. Let’s repeat it: gamification is not the same thing as games. It’s quite simple to see how gamification works in terms of training. We might find it hard to stir up any interest in compliance training, for instance - it’s often boring, samey, can be aimed at a lower level and generally is about as much fun as pulling teeth. Yet when we bring gamification features into compliance training and reward employees with badges, points and achievements for the work they do, it suddenly doesn’t seem quite so painful. These gaming mechanics are things which keep us progressing through video games and motivate us to carry on trying to defeat the ‘boss’, even when we’ve failed ten times in a row. We know we’re so close to completing the level - there’s just one more stage to get through, then we’ll have achieved it. Similarly, gaming metaphors are what keep us repeating levels, exploring video game landscapes and searching for secret items long after we’ve completed the level and can move on to the next: we want to fill that progress bar completely and bask in the glory of achieving a perfect kill-death ratio, getting a 100% completion rate, maxing out our ‘skills’ and unlocking all the hidden gems. That’s not to say that games don’t have a place in learning. Actually, game-based eLearning is become ever more popular, perhaps partly to cater to employees’ natural affection for video games (because, really, it’s not only youngsters that are ‘gamers’!). But everything in its right place, as the saying goes - game-based eLearning is not the same thing as gamification. It’s about creating learning games to engage, rather than supplementing learning content (e.g. eLearning modules and Learning Management Systems) with gaming mechanics. There’s a huge difference, even if the disparity isn’t that clear through the terms used. You can find out exactly what game-based learning entails by hopping on board our webinar tour of Genie, our game-based authoring tool. Alternatively, click the button below to learn more about gamification and how it can be used in organisations. And just to reiterate - gamification is not gaming!  The post Why we love gamification - but not necessarily the word! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Work-based learning is a fantastic way for employees and organisations to gain access to higher education in a more flexible way. Rather than taking employees out of work and enrolling them on a course to gain a qualification or certificate, organisations can instead set up the working day for employees to complete training little and often during working hours. There are four ‘pillars’ to consider when rolling out work-based learning: the learner, the academic environment, the workplace and the external context. The learner Getting learners to engage with the training might be difficult at first, especially if online learning is new to them, they have been out of the learning game for a good few years, or they aren’t sure why they are being asked to undertake training - it can be a bit insulting to some! It can also include anything that might hold an employee back from learning (previous negative experiences, illnesses, availability) or boost their motivation (say they are looking for a promotion or want to gain a qualification in order to get a new job). Academic environment By which we don’t mean classroom or college, but the virtual learning environment (VLE). For example, the VLE (or Learning Management System) can include eLearning courses supplemented by online learning forums, chat threads and web conferencing. Workplace This includes the actual place of work - not always the same as the place of study - and all that it entails. Here’s a tip: if you expect your employees to undertake training, don’t expect them to do this on top of a hugely packed-out work day. Don’t spring tasks on them. Don’t move deadlines. Don’t ask them to take on the work of someone else who has gone on holiday. Respect the commitment they are about to make to improving their knowledge, as it will surely benefit the company. External professional context Can the company afford to put employees through training? It is an investment both in terms of actual training costs (paying for a VLE) and potentially lost revenue from taking employees away from their daily tasks. However, online learning does mitigate both these issues somewhat as online training is more cost-effective and requires less time away from work-based activities than traditional classroom training. It’s also important to consider not just the employee’s immediate workplace - the office where they work - but also the organisation as a whole. Are all stakeholders eager to push the initiative forward? Does senior management recognise the importance of work-based learning? Research has shown that while expectations of various stakeholders of online learning environments can vary greatly, they are rarely addressed, which can result in ineffective training roll-outs. For instance, the perception of user-friendliness of online learning varies hugely. While employees and learners themselves are happy to use online learning portals to take their training and engage with their fellow learners, other stakeholders - senior management, directors, training admins, etc - find the technology not very user-friendly at all. This means they may not be as engaged with the whole idea of work-based learning, which can filter down to learners. Of course, one reason that the perception of user-friendliness varies so drastically is that learners and training admins use the Learning Management System/online learning platforms in different ways. Learners don’t have to see what might be a complicated back-end, while admins have to access the LMS in different ways and for different purposes; uploading files, for instance. If a Learning Management System is built with just the learner in mind, the experience for admins and other stakeholders will be negative, which will have a detrimental impact on the effectiveness of work-based learning as a whole. If stakeholders don’t truly believe that it’s the best way for their employees to learn, employees will realise this and will become demotivated and disheartened. Luckily, not all LMSs are built this way. The Academy LMS - our very own gamified social LMS - is built with both the learner and the admin in mind, so that the entire process (from uploading content and managing users to taking eLearning courses and conversing with others) is streamlined and engaging. Want to learn more? We can give you a personalised tour of the Academy LMS, ranked the world’s #1 LMS for 2015. Just click the button below!    The post The Latest Must-Have for Your Organisation: Work-Based Learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification in learning isn’t just a fad. It’s not just a ‘nice to have’ to make your learners happier or to satisfy your bosses. There’s so much more to gamification than a feeling of fun, as these six psychological theories of gamification show: The perspective of interest This theory highlights the importance of individual preferences and content in learning. Interest is incredibly variable and personal, which is why it’s important to create gamified learning environments that will interest all kinds of learner. We become motivated through interaction with the gamified learning environment, which ideally leads to complete immersion in a task (or ‘flow’). There are a few ways in which gamified learning environments motivate us, according to this perspective: It interests us and sparks our interest in the situational context - stories within the eLearning can help in this instance. It enhances feelings of ‘flow’ by providing direct feedback for our actions - progress bars and performance graphs can provide this feedback, points function as immediate reinforcement, and the use of personalised avatars also contributes It enhances feelings of ‘flow’ by providing a clear goal - badges, quests and progress bars help to set goals (we know what we have to do to achieve the badge and can see how far we are from completing the level) It enables feelings of ‘flow’ by adapting the difficulty to a learner’s skill level - levels unlock certain learning content that’s suitable to that learner’s ability level The perspective of emotion We are emotional creatures! Our emotions interest with cognitive and motivational process and are certainly influenced by instructional strategies. We’ll be motivated if our gamified learning environment decreases negative feelings like fear, envy and anger, and if it increases positive feelings like sympathy and pleasure - in general, gamification creates positive, happy feelings. It can also get rid of negative feelings by encouraging learners to continue and persevere with their training even when they have failed a test or are finding the topic difficult The perspective of self-determination This theory states that there are three universal psychological needs: the need for competence, the need for autonomy, and the need for social relatedness. If these are fulfilled by the gamified learning environment, we’ll become intrinsically motivated to complete our training - and as we’ve seen before, intrinsic motivation is what we aim for. We’ll be motivated if our gamified learning environment: increases feelings of competence - badges and leaderboards can help with this increases feelings of autonomy - avatars and varying choices for game play contribute to this increases the feeling of social relatedness - team leaderboards make us feel like an important part of a group The trait perspective The idea behind this perspective is that motives and needs evoke motivation. Motives - which are individual characteristics that stay relatively stable over time and context - have a strong influence on behaviour and include achievement, a need for power, and a need for affiliation. When it comes to a gamified learning environment, motivational mechanisms include: A strong sense of achievement, whereby we’ll be motivated if the gamification emphasises achievement, success and progress - leaderboards can give us a sense of achievement A strong sense of power; we’ll be motivated if the gamification emphasises our status, control and competition - badges work as virtual status symbols, as do leaderboards A strong sense of affiliation, i.e. membership - badges can function as a kind of group identification by communicating shared experiences and activities ("Oh, I have that badge too! That must mean you took the Health and Safety eLearning unit, right?") The behaviourist learning perspective This theory states that our motivation results from past experiences - both positive and negative. Any kind of reinforcement we had in the past will influence the probability of future behaviours, which is why performance-related feedback is absolutely essential in gamified online learning environments: We’ll be motivated if gamification provides immediate feedback in the form of positive and negative reinforcement - points cover this We’ll also be motivated if gamification offers the opportunity for rewards (that we consider important) - again, points can be seen as virtual rewards provided for specific actions The cognitive perspective Finally, this perspective says that motivation is the result of a means-end analysis. In other words, we use our knowledge and other internal processes (expectancies, estimations, assessments) to work out whether something is worth doing. In a gamified environment we’ll be motivated if: the goal is clear and achievable - quests, progress bars and specific tasks make goals clear, as do badges the resulting consequences of a goal are highlighted; we know what will happen once we achieve the goal - again, quests and specific tasks show us what the results of our actions will be the importance of our actions are emphasised - quests, again! As you can see, the different psychological perspectives on why gamification motivates us to behave in certain ways is varied. But it’s important to note that these aren’t conflicting or contradictory theories - they are simply different ways of looking at how motivation is influenced by gamification. Taken together, it can be seen how all kinds of gamification will increase learners’ motivation in various ways. Want to learn more about gamification and gamified learning environments? Download our free white paper below!    The post Kick Your Motivation Into Overdrive With Gamification appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Creating engaging eLearning is hard - unless you know a few of these secrets… 1. Scrap the slideshows While they may have their place in meetings and at conferences, slideshows don’t belong in eLearning units. Not only are they dull to look at, but they just don’t engage learners or promote thorough understanding. So skip the slideshow format and your learners will thank you. 2. Use all the tools available to you Sure, it’s easier to just copy and paste a load of text into your authoring tool, but if you’re able to call on videographers, voiceover experts and designers, you really should. It’s much more engaging for learners to watch a video presenter talk through the topic rather than stare at reams of text and try to decipher the meaning. 3. Make it look good They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to eLearning, first impressions are important. Poorly laid out eLearning will be confusing, clashing colours will jar and tiny text will be even more difficult to read. 4. Keep it bite-size If you want your learners to take eLearning, don’t make them commit to 3-hour long modules. Chunk it down into information that can be consumed within, say, 20 or 30 minutes and they’ll be much more likely to actually sit down and take the training. 5. Test it! Have you actually sat down and tried to take the eLearning as a learner would? Really think about the user experience you’ve created. Are you having fun? Are you bored out of your mind? Is the subject matter presented in a compelling way, or would you benefit from more images, a shorter video, or bullet points instead of paragraphs? Think about what you’d like to see - and then make it happen! 6. Add personality Just because its purpose is to impart knowledge doesn’t mean the eLearning has to be boring, monotonous or filled with jargon. In fact, it’s more likely that learners will remember what they’ve learnt if a few jokes or light-hearted witticisms are sprinkled in here and there. What’s more engaging to you: a scenario where Colin has to sell £500 of coffee to hit his target, or where he has to sell £500 of toy spaceships in order to secure his spot on the next flight to Mars and start a new colony? 7. Market it If you do nothing else to improve your eLearning, you should still learn how to market it properly. When you roll out training, learners will only be receptive if they know what’s in it for them. That’s where marketing comes in: shout from the rooftops how the eLearning will benefit learners. Send out newsletters, emails and Vines from senior management saying why they’re backing this exciting new scheme and what great things can be achieved. Don’t just plonk the eLearning unit on your Learning Management System or intranet and expect employees to flock to it - it’ll never happen. But once they know what’s in it for them, you may have to increase your server capacity… We’re in the process of writing a whole new white paper on how to create engaging, compelling eLearning. In the meantime, click the button below to download (for free!) a white paper on how to make the process of content creation fun for developers.    The post 7 Quick Changes to Ramp Up Your eLearning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

With research showing that 80% of learners say their productivity would increase if their organisation was more game-like, and 89% would be engaged with a Learning Management System that had a points system, now is really the time to embrace gamification in your online learning. Far from being a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘we’ll get round to it one day’, gamification - in all its points-allotting, badge-awarding glory - is becoming something that your learners demand. A survey conducted by eLearning expert Craig Weiss - CEO of E-Learning 24/7 - revealed that 98% of his social media followers, readers of his blog, etc had heard of gamification: 86% of respondents wanted badges on their Learning Management Systems, with 45% of those wanting a built-in badge library 82% wanted a leaderboard 76% wanted points And 72% wanted game templates These are very high percentages! Yet, as Craig points out, only 40 out of the 590 LMS vendors he surveyed in 2014 had at least three gamification features (a leaderboard, badges, points). That’s just 6% of Learning Management Systems with the gamification features learners are wanting… However, it’s not all bad news. In 2015, 202 LMS vendors have these three gamification features - and as Craig says, that’s "definitely an improvement from 2014". But are three gamification features sufficient to placate learners’ demands? We think not. Once they have a taste of the gamified life, they’ll start thinking about all the other possibilities out there that their LMS isn’t making available to them. Craig’s article highlights some of the ‘next gen’ gamification features that learners are coming to expect on their Learning Management Systems: A leaderboard on the learner’s dashboard, allowing them to see both the top few learners, as well as their individual ranking (it can be very motivational to see where you stand in comparison to your colleagues!) A built-in badge library (as Craig says, this one’s a ‘no-brainer’) The ability to create your own badges within the system Social learning and collaborative gamification features The ability to link to real-life rewards and remuneration And more! Of course, it’s not just about gamification on the LMS. eLearning courses themselves can be gamified to boost engagement and learner delight. You can read more about creating game-based eLearning here! So if you only make one change to your L&D training plan, make the switch to a gamified Learning Management System. Your learners will thank you! Ps be sure to check out Craig’s blog. He posts regular articles that will most definitely get you thinking - and he’s not afraid to say it like it really is. You can find out why Craig Weiss, #1 on the eLearning Movers and Shakers list for 2015, says Growth Engineering has gone ‘super speed’ on gamification by taking a tour of our Academy LMS - just click the button below!    The post Stop and listen: Your learners are demanding gamification! appeared first on Growth Engineering.