Maybe it’s time to savour your solitude? In a corporate world that is obsessed with self promotion and networking we have cultivated a similar personality style to go with it: the extrovert. The introvert is thoughtful, calm and prepared but is often pushed into positions where they have to play the extrovert. This can be a draining experience, which can lead to frustration and a lack of job satisfaction. Introverts also love to write and make fabulous writers and bloggers, and with social media ruling as the top internet activity they can work up a storm straight from their office chair. We live in a world where some people like to think technology has replaced all ‘meaningful’ communication…. But actually, what it’s really done is create new channels of communication to facilitate a huge rainbow of personalities. No longer are we held back by the lost letter, the awkward silence in a dull conversation, or the beeping of a disconnected phone call. Instead we have access to instant messaging…social media…apps… to name but a few, and they’re all accessible 24/7. Get closer to your team The company-customer relationship may seem like the holy grail of success, but the manager-employee relationship is almost as important as the bond between Batman and Robin. Yes, one might get to wear the fancy cape and play with the big guns, but without Robin watching his back, Batman would fall flat on his masked mug. Speaking of good teams; teamwork, company guidelines and mentoring are some of the best ways to nurture this relationship. Which means that employees need engaging training and informal monitoring to keep them from turning into stagnant worker zombies. Snuggle up to your employees We’re all social at heart, we just socialise in different ways. So getting closer to your employees has never been more important. This is why we’ve integrated a social media platform and a  performance centre into our learning management system, The Academy LMS. This way managers can monitor their employees’ development whenever they need to, and all levels of staff can communicate with each other within the same platform. Meaning you’re able to grow great relationships and see how your work is impacting the company’s wider goals. What a killer combination. Batman and Robin better watch their backs! Whether you’re an introvert, or an extrovert, you’ll feel perfectly at home on the Academy LMS. Why not see for yourself? For the master plan on bringing your team together click here and we’ll be in touch in no time  The post Understanding Employee Performance: The Power of Introverts in a Social World appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Keeping busy can be like a disease. It’s the foolhardy urge to do something… anything and everything… all the time! As long as you’re busy, you’re being productive. In a culture of fast-food, sound bites, links and one-click ordering we’ve lost the skilled craftsmen who are capable of creating a masterpiece instead of something else that will get lost in one of your drawers, or disposed of instantly. Obviously we’re not recommending that you live a monk-like existence, sitting cross-legged at your desk, head-bowed, pondering over your next project. That would just be monkeying around. The corporate environment is a hustle and bustle of clicks, emails, paper jams, coffee, deadlines, project launches, system failures, more coffee, parties, planning… there’s no time for zen. Just get the job done and get it done on time, I hear you say. The Busy Fool Enjoys Manual Labour If you’re still squinting over spreadsheets and spending hours manually updating data, we have news for you… You’re using software from 1985. The only people excited to use this are probably still in shoulder pads and slacks re-watching their MacGyver video collection. There is no menial task that a little technology upgrade can’t help with. Yes, it might cost you a small yearly fee, but imagine the man hours you could save by integrating clever software into your business. You can use software to build customer lists, schedule your social media posts, report on the successes and failures of your campaigns and even manage your staff development. What’s more, it’ll never call in sick, go on holiday, or leave you for a more appealing organisation. Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees So many of us branch into things that aren’t even a part of our job role. Before you know it, you’re dipping in and out of so many projects that you lose sight of why you’re there in the first place. Yes, you’re just skating on the surface of your day, you busy fool. What you need to remember are your objectives, both daily, monthly and even yearly. But you’re probably, already doing that. This is where we see the problem Objectives and KPI’s are usually set at the beginning of each year, or worse simply stated in your contract with limited scope to adapt them as circumstances change. With the Performance Centre KPI’s and objectives can be modified whenever you like. Employees can also log in to see the exact correlation between their tasks and the impact they’re having on the company’s wider strategy. You can also schedule reviews, monitor your to-do lists, and access specific training directly from the platform, in a multitude of fun formats. This is what can change No longer will you have to sit through those dreaded annual performance reviews. Instead you’ll create a dynamic process of monitoring each staff member through a simple (but powerful) online portal. No longer will you fear your impact, worth or need in a job. Instead you’re exposed to the intricacies of your company’s strategies and goals and how you fit into this puzzle. This will also reduce the need for lengthy staff inductions and constant meetings. By bringing staff development and talent management together on one platform you are boosting internal connectivity, fostering an open, productive culture and giving yourself full transparency of your business activities. That’s the glory of technology. It makes us more connected in a world that was unnecessarily fragmented by people with too much time on their hands.   Stop being a busy fool and take matters into your own hands, take a tour of the performance centre now for free!  The post Don’t Be a Busy Fool: Learn to Prioritise using a Performance Management System appeared first on Growth Engineering.

We’ve spoken ad nauseam about Gamification in the past. Seriously. We have many, many blogs on the topic and we’ve got a few in depth white papers, as well. We consider ourselves to be experts on the topic and we love to spread our knowledge around. But this week, we’ve decided to dig a little deeper. This time around, we’ll be sharing some expert level tips for getting more out of the game mechanics on your learning platform. Like Luke receiving his Jedi Training from Yoda on Dagobah, you’ll soon feel like a master of your craft. Think of us as Sir Alex Ferguson, Richard Williams and Sir Clive Woodward, all rolled into one super-coach/next level drill instructor, ready to train you in the dark arts of gamification. When you’re ready to begin, put on your fluorescent pink spandex training suit and we’ll see you at step one. STEP 1: Escape the Badge Buffet with Premium Badges: Most Learning Management Systems will include some kind of badging system. In other words, when a learner completes a piece of content, they’ll be given a certain virtual trinket. Whilst all badges have some degree of motivational power, some badges are more powerful than others. Not all badges are created equal. The harder it is to earn a badge, or the rarer it is, the more your learners will crave it. It’s the difference between eating at the buffet table and being treated to a hand-cooked meal. If you create special ‘one-off’ badges your learners will lust after the virtual reward like Gollum after the ring. You could, for instance, create a badge for being the first learner to complete a piece of content. On Growth Engineering’s Academy LMS, Managers are even able to offer personalised ‘Praise Badges’, whenever one of their charges has done a good job. They can upload images (or use one of the badges already available on the platform) and include a message for the receiver. This way each individual learner can feel like the beautiful and unique snowflake that they really are. STEP 2: Forget the Stick, Offer a Better Kind of Carrot: What’s more effective, the carrot or the stick? How about a delicious, jewel-encrusted, chocolate carrot? Experience Points and virtual Badges can be powerful tools for driving activity,but nothing spurs a learner into life quite like a tangible real-world reward. They’re like friendly learning cattle prods, jolting your learners onto bigger and better things. The completion of some tasks (like staying at the top of the Academy leaderboards for a month, for example), deserves more than a mere pat on the back. But that begs the question: what kind of real world rewards should you be offering? Anything, really. Concert Tickets, Shopping Vouchers, Personal Days and days out for your team. You could even take things to the next level by tying the rewards to your training and development programme. One of our clients, Steinhoff Retail, have a safari animal theme across their Academy LMS, where learners progress from a lowly ‘Spring Hare’ into a mighty ‘Lion’. As part of the programme, learners can earn prizes, like the opportunity to feed lemurs or to be a lion-keeper for the day. If you’re sitting there kicking yourself for failing to wrap your LMS around an awesome theme, then don’t fall into a sinkhole of despair. You can still link your real-world rewards to your content. Why not offer one-on-one sessions with experts from throughout your organisation (and beyond)? STEP 3: The Never-Ending Learning Story: This is a big one. Most learning platforms will let you create courses or curricula, where you can bundle individual learning assets (videos, documents, eLearning units, etc.) into learning packages. This is neat, but as a solution it doesn’t go deep enough. After all, what happens when the learner has sifted through the content and reached the end of the course? Did Alexander not weep when he realised that there were no kingdoms left to conquer? What you (and your learners) really need is the ability to create continuous learning pathways. This can be achieved by using a ‘Levels’ tool on your platform. You’ll need to make a list of the content that’s available on your system and map it onto a series of levels (on the Academy LMS, you can even set ‘required’ and ‘optional’ content). The learner will start at ‘Level One’ (which could be the ‘induction’ level) and will have access to a certain set of content. Once they’ve completed all the tasks required of them, they’ll ‘Level Up’, earning access to all the great new content available to them at ‘Level Two’. You can create as many levels as you like (if you have enough content to do so), so that the fun never needs to stop. The benefits of this approach are clear. Firstly, it eases the pressure on your over-taxed Admins (i.e. the people in charge of maintaining your learning portal), by automating the learning process (as much as such a thing is possible). Secondly, it means your learners will never be left wanting. They’ll always have access to a slew of content that perfectly maps on to their current level of understanding. What’s more, by releasing content in dribs and drabs (rather than making it all available at once), you can create a sense of mystery about the content that’s hidden in the level above them. It’s like the search for the ‘Holy Grail’. You’re never quite sure what you’ll stumble upon next and your quest will never end. It’s not like your learners will ever get to a stage where they ‘know too much’. If you’ve got the structure in place already, then fire away with your content cannon. So there we have it. Three next-level tips for getting more out of your gaming mechanics. Let us know what you think in the comments section. If you want to continue learning, then why not download our white paper on ‘The Business Case for Gamification’. Or, if you’re ready to take a tour of the world’s best Gamified Learning Management System, then please get in touch here, and we’ll make it happen!  The post Become a Gamification Guru: 3 Expert Tips for Getting More out of Your Gaming Mechanics appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Guys, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t looking for some way to get the best ROI from your training programme, right? Well, the bad news is that the perfect L&D strategy isn’t going to flutter off of a rainbow and land in your lap. Don’t lose hope though - the good news is that your friends over here at GEHQ are more than happy to point you in the right direction! Before you make the first mark on your training outline, there’s one colossally huge step that you need to take first. If you skip it, you might as well complete the rest of your programme with a blindfold on. We’re talking about Training Needs Analysis. Training Needs Analysis does what it says on the label - it’s a process of analysing every aspect of your business and identifying the areas that are in most need of a robust training programme. To get your project off to the best start, here are a few handy tips and pointers: Figure out the big picture The first thing you need to do is to identify what your company is trying to achieve. Let’s say your organisation is a marketing agency that provides several services. It’s possible that their video production service costs the business too much money and time, and they’d prefer to focus on web design. If you don’t know this from the outset, you could waste a lot of time plotting a training programme that’s wholly irrelevant to the company’s chosen direction. History is a great teacher Before you go off making a bunch of mistakes, review your company’s previous approach to training. Here’s a whole repository of lessons that can shape your own training program. You can also discover what has produced great results in the past; then you can steal these ideas and claim them as your own! What problems can you solve? Nobody’s perfect, and any company will have a giant wish-list of needs that cover all aspects of the business. You need to know which of these needs can, and should, be addressed by the training. If ancient IT equipment and clunky processes are making things difficult, it’s not your job to fix them. Always ensure that you’re creating a training program that’s appropriate for the company you have - not the one you wish you had. Keep your finger on the pulse We’ve all been there, right? You spend weeks creating some training for an IT system only to discover that, whoops - that system is due to be replaced any day now. That’s not only frustrating - it’s a complete waste of your time, time you could be spending creating an awesome training programme that actually works. If your training content is going to get the best return on investment, you need to make sure that you know about any recent or upcoming changes in processes or procedures. Know your toolkit inside-out It’d be great to have access to a neural reprogramming ray that can instantly zap any information into your learners’ grey matter. Unfortunately, such a device doesn’t exist…yet (we’re working on it). To get the most out of your training, you need to make the best use of the tools you have at your disposal. Maybe that defunct video department can be turned into an in-house training machine. You might not have a learning management system, but perhaps your intranet could be a way of delivering your content. The effectiveness of your training might just hinge on how well you utilise your existing resources. Analysing your training needs is the first rung on a very tall ladder, but it is the step on which all of the others rest. Get this part right and you’ll have the best foundation for success that you could wish for and you’ll be turning your learners into superheroes without the need for brain-altering ray guns! Once you’ve established your needs, you’re going to want a way to solve all of your issues and make your training and development dreams come true. To do this you’ll need some awesome content that engages your learners and makes them actually want to learn. Well, guys - wake up and stop dreaming, because Genie is here to help! Genie is a game-based authoring tool that lets you collaborate with your whole team and easily create learning games that capture your learners’ imagination. Visit unleashthegenie.com now to start your free demo and join the learning revolution! Check out 5 More Steps to Training Needs Analysis Heaven for even more TNA pointers!  The post 5 steps to Training Needs Analysis heaven appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Games are for kids, right? There’s no way you’d catch a self-respecting adult playing Monopoly or Call of Duty. Adults are too busy opening savings accounts, returning library books, drinking coffee and indulging in other adult-like behaviour. But wait, what’s that you say? According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is 35 years old. In fact, only 26% of gamers are under 18. Well, that blows the stereotypical view of the gamer as a spotty, socially-awkward teenage boy out of the water. Gaming culture is now inescapable. Check out what Michael D. Gallagher, the president of the Entertainment Software Association has to say: "Video games are ingrained in our culture. Driven by some of the most innovative minds in the tech sector, our industry’s unprecedented leaps in software and hardware engages and inspires [a] diverse global audience." As Gallagher notes, it’s all about engagement. Game mechanics engage a wide variety of demographics. With the rise of Gen Y, this situation isn’t going to change any time soon. To ignore this fact when it comes to designing your Learning & Development programme would be foolish indeed. Let’s stick to the facts. According to a study from the University of Colorado, simulations and games have a huge effect on end learners. In fact, those who took game-based learning (rather than your typical, workaday learning content), scored 14% higher in their assessments and registered a 9% increase in their retention rate. So game-based learning works. But that doesn’t mean it’s something that learners want. Surely your learners will want to stick to tried and tested instructional methods? What learner doesn’t jump up and down at the thought of blowing the dust off of an old textbook and leafing through hundreds of pages? Ah, but wait. A survey from TalentLMS reveals that 79% of learners believe that their motivation would be boosted if their learning environment was more like a game. This shouldn’t be surprising. The benefits of ‘play’ are numerous. It reduces stress, stimulates the mind and improves brain function. As George Bernard Shaw once said, "We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing". News just in: It’s not just kids who like to have fun. Whatever age we are, we all get a kick out of a healthy dopamine spike. We can’t turn off the pleasure receptors in our brain. Why would we want to? With that in mind, maybe it’s time that we stop thinking of games as a mere distraction. The old guard would have you think that they’re a distraction, or an indulgence. But times are changing. The use of game mechanics within learning content grows more sophisticated by the day. It’s now easier than ever to create your own learning games. That leaves us with one final question. Do you want to adapt to this changing landscape or do you want to stick to your fusty training manuals and outdated slideshows? That’s our opinion. But why not find out for yourselves? Using the Genie Content Authoring Tool, you can create fully-formed learning games for your team. Sign up for a free 30-day demo here!  The post Do Learning Games Work in an Adult Learning Context? appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Here’s one for you gamification gurus out there! We’ve talked a lot about how important badges are in a gamified online learning solution. A virtual badge might seem like a silly little trinket, but don’t be fooled - these silly little trinkets actually affect your brain and change the way you approach a task, making you strive for awesomeness without even realising it! You can read more about how badges work here and here, but we’re not going to cover that today. Today we’re rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty with some practical advice on how to make the best, most desirable badges your learners could wish for! Ready to go? Okay… Image is everything It might seem superficial and shallow, but appearances matter when it comes to badges. Your learners go through a lot to earn these awards, so they need to look like they’re worth working for. Don’t worry. You don’t need a top-notch design department to make a great badge image. With some rudimentary image editing software and a little time, you can create something truly magical. Once you’ve made your first badge, you’ll then have something that can work as a template moving forward. Here are some pointers to help you: Make sure the colours you use reflect your corporate identity. Keep your badge images around 500 X 500 pixels to avoid loss in quality. Use badge images that are relevant to the challenge at hand. Make them earn it! If you hand out badges willy-nilly for every little thing, you run the risk of devaluing them. Your badges should reflect the nature of the task, i.e. the more difficult the task, the more awesome the badge should be! Now, we’re not saying that you should hoard your badges like a white-knuckled old miser. It’s perfectly okay to award badges for minor challenges too, but these should look like minor badges. One way that you can differentiate the good badges from the awesome badges is to colour-code them. There’s this little thing called the Olympic Games - you might have heard of it. Their medals are ranked from bronze, to silver, to gold. It’s clear to everyone who takes part that silver is better than bronze and gold is better than silver. You could use a similar hierarchy with your badges and generate some Olympic-calibre competitiveness around your learning content! Get the name right What’s in a name? Well to answer that question, let’s try a little thought experiment. Let’s say you’ve worked hard for a solid hour to complete an eLearning unit about performance management for managers. You finish your training and you get a notification on your screen telling you that you’ve won the Performance Management Training Badge.   Whoo-pee.   Now, imagine a bright and shiny alternative universe where you don’t receive the Performance Management Training Badge. Instead, you get the Master Mentor badge! Not only have you earned a badge, but you feel like you actually are a master mentor. It feels good, doesn’t it!? It’s certainly a lot better than a mere functionally descriptive title. Add a winning description If your training delivery system is worth its salt, you’ll also be able to add a description to your badge. This is usually used to tell the winner why they earned it. In much the same way as the title, this is yet another opportunity for you to make the learner feel awesome. Generally speaking, you’ve only got a certain amount of space in which to fit your description. It’ll take a little word wizardry to get your message across, but your description should: Congratulate the winner Tell them why they earned the badge Tell them that they are amazing If you can fit that into a couple of lines and keep it super-enthusiastic (the more over-the-top, the better), then you’re on to a winner. Let them show off What good is a trophy if nobody but you can see it? To get the most out of your badges, you need to give the learner the opportunity to show them off! If we take the Academy LMS as an example, any time somebody earns a badge, it appears in the social feed for all to see. The Academy also features a leaderboard which ranks everyone according to how many badges they’ve earned. Of course, we use our LMS for our own internal training and it never ceases to amaze how hard people will work just to knock their co-workers off of the top spot! Even if they are virtual tokens, your learners will still be proud of every badge they earn, so you should also look for ways to let them share their badges outside of their LMS. Give them the means to share their badges on Facelink or Pinbook or whatever the kids are using these days, and they’ll be only too glad to do it! If you’re really clever, you can award badges for that as well! So look, we know you must be crazy-excited to try some of these ideas out for yourself and we’ve got the perfect playground for you! Just pop along to unleashthegenie.com, sign up for a demo (it’s totally free!), and start building a game-based eLearning unit. It’s easy as pie to upload your own badge images, create titles and descriptions, and assign them to screens. And just wait ‘til you see what happens when you actually earn a badge! We won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s awesome! Happy building!  The post Building Better Badges for your Online Learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Many moons ago, a wise prophet stood before the earth and proclaimed ‘So come on let me entertain you. Let me-eeee entertain you’. And although no one knows the exact source of this quote, it is widely accepted as some of the wisest Western philosophy of all time (since the year 1997). However, in the (eighteen) years since, we’ve lost sight of that simple message. And what was once exciting is now dull. Ordinary. Like when all the lava in a lava lamp just subsides at the bottom of it and it becomes a bog standard lamp. A lamp which doesn’t even work very well. And it’s sitting in a cupboard gathering dust. I’m talking about you, eLearning. Look at you, you’ve let yourself go terribly. No one wants to listen to you anymore. You’re just hanging about going unnoticed. Because you’re being selfish and refusing to show consideration to the learner. Entertainment is vital. Which is why voice is so important - and by finding it you can inspire anyone to learn. Hey I don’t wanna ‘Rock DJ’ on about this (another quote from who knows where), but making this stuff entertaining again is the only way to capture the masses. The more entertaining you make things, the keener your employees will be to learn. Because if people don’t pay attention they won’t learn diddly squat. Unconvinced so far? Here’s an example. Below is some typical, boring office speak. To understand the importance of voice, try reading this to yourself. "Employees are expected to treat all information with utmost confidentiality. This applies to telephone, email and all other forms of communication blah blah blah mail merge’. Now read this passage re-written in a pirate voice. "Argh! Ye seadogs shall ne’er breath a word of this else ye fear walking the plank! Not ye scrolls, parchments or messages in ye bottles blargh! blargh! blargh! mail merge’. Notice the difference? You’ve probably learned loads more. Soon you and your office will rule the seven seas. Hooray! Think how many people thrive on entertaining themselves reading the new John Grisham or 50 Shades of Grey. Millions! Then think of how many people sit at home to read manuals about how to use a VCR. Six tops - and they’re all weird. But here’s the trick - imagine if VCR manufacturers could entertain on that level? If, somehow, E.L. James wrote an erotic thriller about how to properly set your Toshiba? Your audience would enjoy learning so much more. (Although perhaps they’d never be able to look their recording device directly in the eyes again). And not only would they enjoy learning more, they’d learn better. It’s important the reader shouldn’t feel like they’re even learning at all. The audience is engaged when the writer resists myopically focusing on the subject. They should just absorb all of this information the earth’s surface is 70% water without even noticing. See, you didn’t even notice you were learning there. Go back and read it again. You might notice a hidden fact. Voice is vital if you want to stand out. Get it right and you can really take off. Soon you’ll have ‘stars directing your fate’ (unknown, 1998). But only if you make your readers enjoy your writing so much they have no choice but to share it. Make them laugh, cry, do a somersault, just don’t bore them whatever you do. There’s enough boring things on the internet anyway, usually sites ending in .gov.uk or anything without a picture of a cat. ‘But I’m a really dull person! How can I possibly entertain anyone?’ I hear you cry.  Well, practice makes perfect. Try changing your voice in these situations to start with. Maybe sing while you pick up the phone. Or make your shopping list rhyme. It’s hard to find a supermarket that sells ‘bread’ and ‘lead’. But it’s a good start. Soon you’ll be a pro. I’ll leave you with my famed Robert de Niro impression. ‘You talkin’ to me?’ Admittedly this doesn’t work as well written down. If at all. But if you could hear it, you would agree it’s the perfect way of showing just how important voice is to entertainment. And if you don’t, then you might as well ‘be loving angels instead’ (no idea) you big, busted lava lamp. Oh, and if the whole voice thing doesn’t work, here’s the cat. Juliette Denny is the Managing Director of Growth Engineering. Her focus is on building technology solutions that engineer growth for clients, whilst making learning fun for learners. Follow her on Twitter and let her know whether you liked the article!  The post Let My (eLearning) Entertain You: Why Voice & Character is Wildly Important! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Earlier in the week, we shared three top tips to help you develop into a card carrying gamification guru. However, our gamification goblet runneth over and we’ve got yet more suggestions to serve up. If you’re ready to become the Michael Jordan of game mechanics, then read on… Remember, these pointers are aimed at those who have (at least) an intermediary level of knowledge when it comes to applying gamification. If you’re a gamification greenhorn, we recommend you start here instead. For those who are already well versed in the dark arts of gamification, let’s get started. STEP 1: Let Your Social Butterflies Take Flight: In too many cases, the virtual rewards across a learning platform focus solely on driving the completion of learning content. Whilst this is important, it’s better by far to aim at creating a cohesive learning community, where knowledge sharing and the growth of intellectual capital is encouraged (and rewarded). Throughout your team, you’ll have information-silos that are just begging to be tapped into. Without a system that gives you the tools to facilitate this process, you’ll never unlock your inner knowledge-baron. By easing the communication process, creating Insight Groups around salient subject matter and rewarding the flow of information, you’ll soon foster an organisation full of wise old sages, brainboxes and unashamed eggheads. Soon enough best practise will become every-day practise. ‘But how is this possible?’ I hear you ask. The ‘Achievements’ system on our Academy LMS, allows certain badges to be ‘triggered’ by user events. For instance, a learner can receive a badge and some experience points for commenting on a video for the 5th time, for sharing their 10th link on the dialogue stream, or for answering a learner’s question in the experts section. If you’ve spent any time with a Playstation or an Xbox in recent years, you’ll be more than aware of how effective an Achievement system can be. Either way, it’s time to stop clipping the wings of the social butterflies within your organisation and to start rewarding informal learning. STEP 2: STREAM - Status Rules Everything Around Me: Increased status sometimes acts as its own reward. If a particular learner has made a certain amount of progress, then surely these breakthroughs need to be recognised on theplatform? If a learner has earned fame for their admirable knowledge-sharing bona-fides, then surely they deserve to be positioned as some kind of ‘Expert’ on your learning platform? Some Learning Management Systems will let you build ‘Level Structures’ on your platform, so that you can provide continuous development pathways for your learners. If you’ve got a particularly swanky LMS (like ours, for instance), then it should also let you name these levels, so that learners feel a real sense of progression as they move through the content. A learner might start off as a ‘Beginner’ or a ‘Rookie’ and work their way up through the ‘Intermediary’ levels before earning their status as a ‘Master’ or ‘Veteran’. This is all well and good, but this is an area where we recommend that you have some fun (whilst trying to draw from your existing brand values). Why not build a level structure based around superheroes (Vigilante, Sidekick, Speedster, Shapeshifter, Mentalist, etc.) or cats - everybody loves cats (how about: Kitten, Wildcat, Panther, Leopard, Tiger, Lion?) and design the imagery used around your platform with this theme in mind? On the Academy LMS, you’re also able to label certain learners as ‘Experts’. The effect of this is two-fold. Firstly, you’ll give your newly-formed experts warm fuzzy feelings. Secondly, these experts will now be accessible through the ‘Experts Area’, where they can be asked questions and help to create a smarter, better informed, learning community. STEP 3: Your Mission, If You Choose to Accept It… Verily, brave learning warrior, arise, conquer your training goals and claim your booty! But take heed. There be many a strange adventure ahead that will befall you in your valorous quest. King Arthur could have picked no better champion. Now, valiant knight, go forth and vanquish this Health & Safety training, post-haste! If appropriate, why not add a narrative to your learning? The fine folks at Buffer have already noted that storytelling is an amazingly effective way of activating all the key areas of our brain. The radio receiver that is your brain is never more receptive than when it’s tuned into a storytelling station. From a learner’s perspective, it breaks up their training content and throws them straight into the learning experience. We’re not suggesting that you need to transform your training course into the next great work of literature. In fact, we recommend that you keep it simple. One of our customers has had great success by using a ‘Mission’ structure, where every course has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. The beginning sets up the rest of the course, the middle is where most of the learning happens and the end is where the learner receives an award for completing the mission. This can be in the form of a shopping voucher, a day out or a team meal. This loose story-based structure ties neatly onto the gaming mechanics available on the platform. You can tie mission progress to ‘Level’ progress and create special ‘Badges’ and images that reflect the story being told. Soon enough you’ll have created a paradigm shift within your learners’ minds. Learning will no longer be viewed as a chore. Phew! You made it to the end… You know what that means, right? You’re now a legitimate Gamification Guru. When you’re finished running laps around the room, let us know how you feel in the comments section. If you’d like to continue learning, then why not check out our somewhat brilliant white paper, ‘The Business Case for Gamification’. Alternatively, if you’d like to see the world’s best Gamified Learning Management System in action, then sign-up for a tour here!  The post 3 More Expert Tips for Unlocking Your Inner Gamification Guru: appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Over millions of years, the natural world has evolved so we can adapt perfectly to our surroundings. First man could crawl, then stand, then text while walking. In the animal world, evolution peaked at the chameleon - a miracle of nature that can blend in anywhere simply by changing the colour of its skin, allowing it to go completely unnoticed. Then, in about 1982, the flamingo came along and wrecked all of that. Nature has never offered a reasonable explanation for why a metre-tall, shocking pink bird exists. But who cares? The flamingo doesn’t even try to fit in. He knows he’s a big deal and flaunts his feathers about like a beaked Kardashian. We can all learn from this. Everyone likes to look at beautiful things like Mr Flamingo. They make our brains react positively, which in turn makes the brain work better. This is why glossy magazines put attractive people on the cover. Their dazzling looks reel us in so we buy the magazine. Or at the very least take it from a dental surgery. Dentists aside, to really capture the public’s imagination, you should be doing the same with your eLearning’s aesthetics. Which brings us to our fun flamingo fact number one… Flamingo Fact 1: Flamingos are not an endangered species. In fact their numbers are remarkably stable. Yep, flamingos are doing great by standing out from the crowd. But you know what’s dying out? A third of the world’s chameleon species, that’s right. Just like these magic lizards think they can do the bare minimum and look exactly the same as everything else, eLearning punishes unoriginality in the same way. If you’re boring and just ‘fit in’ what’s the point? No one will take notice of you and you’ll eventually disappear. Every serious business with eLearning to roll out, should make their user interface a thing of beauty. Think Michelangelo meets Steve Jobs. Because aesthetics evoke positive emotions. And these emotions make users more motivated, less frustrated and help them enjoy learning more. That way, all learners will get the best possible results. Done! Easy. Wait, wait, wait. This doesn’t mean you just create any old nonsense. Yes, if your interface were to look like some tie-dye, dadaist monstrosity even Lady Gaga would be embarrassed by, then sure it would stand out. But not in a good way. The flamingo may be startling, but at the end of the day, it’s still a bird. So there’s a few constraints to bear in mind. Firstly, the brain loves symmetry, so it can go into autopilot and process other information. If there’s no pattern, your brain will treat the interface as a distracting puzzle and, instead of absorbing the important learning material, will just give up. I want to get to the juicy stuff, not navigate my way through a magic eye puzzle (all that work just to see a floating dolphin? If I wanted to see a dolphin that much, I’d google it). Secondly, you might think font size, typography and other words from the Microsoft Office glossary are fairly unimportant. But they’re not! 45% of consumers make judgements about a site’s credibility based on these variables. And in just 3.2 seconds. They’ll either be hooked or zone out before you can say ‘I wonder if the dental receptionist noticed the magazines under my arm?’ Users can tell who hasn’t bothered to make their content look good. So why should they waste their time on it? Worried it’s too late to do anything about your brand’s appearance? Time for flamingo fact number two… Flamingo Fact 2: Flamingo chicks are born grey with white feathers. They don’t turn pink for a year or two. So fear not, you too can become a beautiful pink flamingo soon. It’s never too late to create your brand’s look, but the sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll reap the rewards. You wouldn’t go out in stinky clothes or with lipstick streaked over your forehead. It would reflect badly on you. In the same way, the uglier your content is, the uglier your brand looks. Makeover time! As well as being beautiful, all content should fit your brand in a way which is distinctive and reflective of company values. If done right, people will be able to recognise it without even seeing your name. Looking good! You’ve still got lipstick on your head though. Sit still, I’ll get it… So make sure your site is attractive. Make sure your LMS looks good. Unique. Symmetrical. Shiny. A good question to ask before you finish with the aesthetics of your content is ‘would a magpie steal this?’ If the answer is no, then why not? You give that magpie no chance but to rob you blind. Think that’s the end of the facts or the bird stuff? Hey, one more for good measure. Flamingo Fact 3: After mating, the male and female flamingo build a nest together and take it in turns to sit on the egg … Actually, no, that one’s not really relevant. The important thing is, when it comes to your business’s aesthetics - be a flamingo, not a chameleon. And soon enough, thousands will flock to look at you. Juliette Denny is the Managing Director of Growth Engineering. Her focus is on building technology solutions that engineer growth for clients, whilst making learning fun for learners. Follow her on Twitter and let her know whether you liked the article!  The post 3 Undeniable Facts About Aesthetics in eLearning (& Flamingos) appeared first on Growth Engineering.

It’s Monday morning. You arrive at work after a relaxing weekend with your batteries fully charged and a look of sheer determination in your eyes. "This week," you say to yourself, "I’m going to make a real difference to some lucky learners." But once you sit down at your desk and look at your to-do list, the volume of work in front of you is dauntingly huge. How can you change your learners’ lives if you just don’t have the time or the tools? Don’t panic guys! There’s a solution to every problem, and the challenge of producing eLearning on time is no different. Before diving head-first into your huge workload, take five minutes to read our top tips for speeding up your eLearning production! Collaborate It’s great that you want to change your learners’ lives and give them an experience that engages them, but you can’t expect to do it all by yourself! Every superhero finds themselves working with others to bring down the forces of darkness, no matter how reluctantly. Maybe you’re another lone ranger, a renegade on the fringes - but think about how much easier it would be to enlist the help of other experts. Collaboration in eLearning is essential to delivering your projects on time. You could have the most advanced eLearning in the world and a budget the size of a small country, but it’ll count for nothing if nobody on the team knows what anybody else is doing. With the rise in cloud-based applications, there’s never been a better choice of collaboration tools. Whether you create a notebook in Evernote, or make use of Trello’s Kanban boards, your team should agree on an online project management solution that works for everyone. If you’re still at a loss on what to do next, follow the link for a few winning tips to boost collaboration in your eLearning production! Why not let your imagination off the leash completely? What if your eLearning production tool had a built-in project management capability? Hold that thought… Use templates Whenever a car manufacturer designs a new car, they don’t first sit down to design a wheel. We’ve had wheels for a long time. When it comes to wheels, we’re good. The traditional car template has four wheels and that’s worked pretty well up until now. It’s the same for eLearning. Through trial and error and decades of successes and failures, we know what works well and what doesn’t. From experience, we’ve collected a library of features that good eLearning should have, from the individual screen-types down to the overall UI. With an eLearning template, you don’t have to expend development resources and valuable time on building every unit from the ground up. All you need to do is populate that template with the relevant information and you have an ace piece of eLearning in a fraction of the time! Still, there’s always room for improvement. You should always be looking for new ways to engage your learners. Maybe they’d much rather be playing a game than taking a HR Policy quiz. Who says they can’t do both? More on that later! Keep organised Even with an online project management tool and a killer eLearning template, there’s no excuse for sloppiness. Think for a moment - how many hours of your time have been lost because someone misplaced some essential assets? When you’re looking for ways to improve the efficiency of your eLearning production, it’s not enough to find tools that make the individual processes faster. You need to examine what you’re doing right now and to look for the cracks in the floorboards. Asset management is just as important as project management. One way to avoid unforeseen delays is to keep your images, videos and audio files in the same location. Make sure everybody knows where this location is and they have the required permissions to update the files. In conclusion, you need a project management tool, a tool for building engaging eLearning from templates and an asset management tool. On top of that, all of these tools have to be 100% collaborative so that your team members have full visibility over the project. In a perfect world, you would just have one tool that does all of these things, but surely that’s just wishful thinking… Not at all! Genie is a game-based eLearning authoring tool that’s built on collaboration. With Genie, you can manage your whole team and choose from a library of awesome games to create your eLearning around. With this powerful tool at your fingertips, the learner engagement that you dream of on Monday morning will be a reality by Friday. Give it a shot for yourself and start your free 30-day demo today!  The post 3 ways to speed up eLearning production appeared first on Growth Engineering.