You have probably learned this back in school – the better the learning experience (good rewards system, recognition and healthy competition), the better are the outcomes.

The same logic applies to a Learning Management System. So, if you want to incentivize learners in the digital classroom, you will have to use an LMS that enhances the learning experience.

In other words, you will need the ones that support gamification – a tool that will enable you to create a course and add elements of a game to it.

According to the Gartner study, around 70% of business transformation efforts fail due to lack of user engagement. Also, to deliver excellent learning experience to the learners’, businesses’ need to use a technique called ‘gamification.’

Do you know McDonald’s faced a problem initially to train their young staff and what did they do to resolve it? They came up with an idea of using 2 Nintendo stations for each of their 3800 stores in Japan to train and develop expertise.

If you are still uncertain that gamification is what you are looking for, here are top five reasons why your LMS should support gamification.

Better Knowledge Retention

When learning turns out to be a thrilling and fun activity; the chances are that the information learned will be retained for more extended periods of time. This saves time for both students and course creators, which is especially important in the corporate environment.

Studying is not much different from regular work. People do their job better when it is fun; they know why they are doing it, and they know that there will be a reward for it at some point.

Gamification adds more information to the process of studying engagingly, and it helps people retain the information for a significant amount of time. What’s more critical, LMS platforms are built to be easy to use, so that everyone can leverage the power of gamification in his or her online training and courses.

The bottom line is that an LMS becomes a much more efficient tool when it supports gamification.

Learn more about increasing retention and beating the Forgetting Curve in this Speexx e-book!

Games Play to Our Nature

People love to spend time on their smartphones. According to a study in the USA, every millennial spend around 223 minutes on mobile devices and this number is expected to grow till 2021 up to 190 minutes per day.

When it comes to downloading games, people are always proactive. In fact, we have seen it with PC, Kinect for Xbox and Sony PlayStation. Today, thanks to technology, games, and gaming, in general, has no limits. Take a look at the App Store and the Play Store. The apps with the most downloads are games.
If games have so much potential for engagement, why not use them in the learning process and consider including them when you decide to create a course? Learning online has its benefits, but it has its downsides too.

The studies show that due to excessive downloads of mobile games in 2015, the revenue of Chinese mobile game market generated the revenue of around 6.5 billion U.S. dollars.

With no person-to-person experience, online learning goes for as long as the student is motivated. This is where gamification kicks in perfectly. There is another aspect of games that makes them so engaging – the competitive side of gaming.

So if you ask me, if a Learning Management System with gamification features helps you to turn to learn into a competing adventure for your students or employees, it’s a win-win situation.

Better Recognition and Healthy Competition

Whether we like to admit it or not, humans are beings that strive for specific places in the social hierarchy and enjoy the process of climbing to them. For instance, did you know that employees see status at the workplace to be equally important as their paycheck?

If you want to help your employees and their efforts to be well-recognized, a learning management system with a little support from gamification can help you with that. How? You can implement different reward systems like badges, coins, points, leaderboards and so on.

Backed up with an LMS control and gamification module, the reward system treats all participants the same, which ensures that everyone competes under the same terms.

The reward is streamlined, and it becomes automated once you create a course, so you won’t need to oversee the process personally at all times. The system can be set to deliver special rewards to those who’ve made enormous progress and sent wake-up calls to those who fall too far behind.

Self-Esteem and Budget-friendly

Students’ and employees’ self-esteem is not something that you should take lightly. Failing to succeed in projects, whether they are training-related or other, can harm their self-esteem, with devastating consequences on their overall performance in the future. A learning management system with gamification support can protect students from processing failures in such fashion.

They are closed, private systems that can be set not to share the participants’ results with others, at least not until the student allows it in the settings. By giving the students new opportunities to learn in a fun and engaging way, and full control and responsibility for the entire process, you will help them become more confident and more confident.

On the other hand, gamification can help organizations save extra cash by allowing them to emulate real-world experience in a software system. Learners can try, fail and learn as many times as they want, and it won’t have an impact on any of the company’s metrics.

Instant Feedback

Feedback is an essential aspect of learning. It helps the student see how well he performs and if there’s any room for improvement. A cloud-based LMS that supports gamification enables precisely this. Gamification generates feedback automatically, in real time and continuously.

Take a leaderboard for instance – a standard part of the gamification toolbox. A student can get two types of leaderboards. One where they are competing with their past selves, and another who compares all individuals enrolled in a course. This type of instant feedback increases productivity and is bound to bring incredible results.

Gamification keeps on giving the students an opportunity to see and understand how they are performing, and in which areas they can improve. This provides a constant stream of motivation that has a positive impact on the learning habits of students. In any case, with modern LMS tools, you will be able to choose the type of feedback. As we have previously discussed, it can be a leaderboard, but it can be some reward too.

Time to Join the Gamification Bandwagon

Gamification is a compelling method designed to help you enhance the learning experience of a university or a corporate environment. A cloud-based LMS that supports gamification will motivate the course attendees to learn more and improve knowledge retention. All that by transforming learning into a fun, fair and engaging experience.

Learn more about gamification and microlearning in this Speexx e-book!