Posted by A Gartner report says that by 2015, 50% of organizations managing innovation processes will gamify aspects of their business. In another case, 53% of the respondents participating in a Pew research found said that by 2020 gamification will be widely adopted by most of industries, communications scene and most of all education.
With all the hype about transforming simple training into a holistic and integrated ‘learning’ and thereby development process, this should hardly come as a surprise.
Now the question is, how to make learning fun? Yeah. Gamification. But how exactly to integrate it into your learning function? We’ll help you through.
First things first. Gamification is the integration of game-like elements into any activity in order to encourage engagement in it. Simply putting up any random game to increase the fun part within or at the end of your learning programmes will only prove counter productive; because more often than not, learners would eke out their way through the module to reach the game. For this to be avoided you need to identify two things: the activity and the game-like elements.
The Activity
What is it that you want your learners to learn through this game? Is it decision making? Charting out strategies based on available resources and constraints? Learning how to trade stocks in the market? Or the dynamics of brand building?
Basically, what instructional or elearning based training programme would you most truly want your employees to undergo? The answer which you get is the activity you want to gamify. For example, IBM succesfully implemented a game called Innov8 which had players dealing with a fictional company to understand the relationship between IT and business processes.
The Game-Like Elements
Here comes the fun part. You know what you want them to learn. Now is the time to wrap it up in something that’s fun and gets them going by themselves. For example, integrating point earning systems or giving virtual currencies that can be traded for extra levels are sure to increase engagement by presenting a learner with challenges and finally achieving a sense of accomplishment. Moreover, if you have a social learning LMS in your organization, learners will automatically be self-motivated to outperform their colleagues.
It may sound too good to be true, but the result of this will be a win-win situation for all– your learning function gets what it wanted, while creating a self-propagating, healthy learning environment which is both challenging and competitive.
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