Over the last few decades, we’ve been seeing a gradual increase in technology use for educational purposes. Classrooms have become increasingly dependent on tools like computers, tablets, and online curriculum. In fact, school districts in the US used an average of 1,449 digital tools every month during the 2020-2021 school year.

While technology use does offer some clear benefits for educators and students alike, there are also some valid concerns about this approach.

One 2019 survey indicated that technology was distracting for almost half of all students in the classroom.

So, how much technology is needed for student learning, and when does it become disruptive? Let’s take a look.

The Good & Bad of Tech for Students

We hear all the time that too much “screen time” is bad for kids. But does that apply to educational settings? What are the consequences of kids using technology at school all day, and then coming home to watch TV, do homework online, and play video games for hours? According to the Mayo Clinic, too much screen time can lead to irregular sleep, poor academic performance, less time spent on active play, and behavioral problems.

Obviously, there are pros and cons to using tech in the classroom. During the COVID-19 pandemic, technology was a literal lifesaver, helping to limit the spread of a deadly disease while allowing schools to continue providing students with an education, limited though it might have been.

But now that students are heading back into the classroom, how much technology should be used? Though there are currently no best practices established, researchers have begun to analyze the effects of technology in the classroom by using 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data.

Some devices were shown to produce worse student outcomes, which indicates that schools would do well to carefully consider what types of technology they invest in. The analysis also shows that it might be best to keep educators in charge of tech in the classrooms, as device use by teachers was associated with higher scores than technology in the hands of students.

Although these results already tell us a lot, there is still much we don’t know about how to optimize tech use in the classroom. However, they do indicate that education leaders need to tread carefully and thoughtfully in introducing more tech.

Technology Gaps & Class Divide

The pandemic revealed many inequalities in the American education system, as schools were forced to take their classes online. Around 15 million students (out of roughly 50 million total) did not have adequate Internet access to fully participate in virtual classroom assignments or the devices they needed to reach their learning goals during the pandemic. Missing school due to lack of access causes students to fall behind, making it difficult for them to catch up.

Income inequality will continue to affect low-income students more as technology’s presence in the classroom increases. The digital divide in education exists not only because individual families do not have the money to buy devices and Internet access, but because low-income schools also cannot afford to fund the necessary equipment.

If the education system intends to continue relying on digital curriculums, it will have to grapple with this reality and help students affected by a lack of resources. The good news is that some nonprofits, such as EducationSuperHighway, are working toward equitable internet access for all U.S. households.

Gamified Learning Is Effective & Enriches Education

One hugely positive trend made possible by technology in education is the gamification of core concepts that all students need to master as they progress through the school system. Children are playful by nature and respond well to learning that is delivered in a “game” format.

Additional engagement isn’t the only benefit of gamification, however. Gamification can help with concentration, processing, and information recall. In short, children learn and retain information better when it’s fun! Several EdTech companies now recognize this and have begun to incorporate gamification into their software for both students and educators. Technology provides the ideal system for this purpose.

Looking Ahead and Considering the Impact of Technology on Students

Clearly, technology offers the education system a range of powerful benefits. However, as we look to the future, it’s important to understand how and when EdTech should be used to help students learn, grow, and prepare for life in a digital world.

In the United States, McKinsey reports that students who use devices for more than 60 minutes a week have better academic outcomes, but it’s important to remember that there are many factors in play when it comes to academic performance. 81% of educators have become more confident in their ability to use EdTech since the pandemic, which could ultimately boost the benefits of using technology in the classroom.

Tech in the classroom is a delicate balance. And for now, we need to learn more about how it affects students and ensure equal access to digital resources before we go full steam ahead.

Featured Image: ThisIsEngineering, Pexels. 

The post The State of Technology in Education appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In recent years, educators who spend any time on the internet have no doubt come across one particular buzzword: gamification. For anyone struggling to boost engagement in snoozy subjects, it seems like the perfect solution. The term is often confused with another popular pedagogy: game-based learning. So—what’s the difference? And more importantly, which works better?

Caveat: this article focuses primarily on the digital side of using games to enhance education. Gaming in education certainly exists IRL and has been shown to be highly effective, but that’s a subject for another time.

The Difference Between Gamification and Game-Based Learning

With gamification, the educator starts with your educational material. She then applies techniques that tend to hook learners to said material. This might involve point-scoring, achieving badges, keeping a leader board (and rewarding those leaders), developing a narrative and characters around the material, implementing problem-solving into the process, etc. In other words, it goes something like “learning module -> x -> gamified learning.”

Game-based learning, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction. An educator begins first with an existing game (or in rare circumstances, one he designed). He then transforms  course material to fit that game. For example, the most recent version of “Assassin’s Creed” involves a type of gameplay called ‘Discovery Mode.’ This allows the gamer to tour through the completely recreated ancient city of Alexandria in Egypt (along with the surrounding regions). It was designed by a team of leading Egyptologists and no violence or mischief is involved. The map guides the gamer to notable sites and includes descriptions and the source material used to reimagine them.

Then there’s KFC, which debuted a VR fry cook training module last summer. After donning the VR headset, rookie fry cooks find themselves in an escape room-type environment. They are tasked with correctly frying up the signature chicken while the specter of Col. Sanders heckles them.

Related, but Notably Different

Many don’t fully understand the difference between the two. For example, eLearning Inside published an article earlier this year on digital badges, a hallmark of gamification. One commenter writes, “Just because badges may not have a significant impact within education does not mean gamification in general is a failed experiment. My son is 9 years old and typing over 50 words per minute. How? Because of a typing game… he’s been obsessed with it. If his typing practice wasn’t gamified he’d probably still be typing with 2 fingers. It’s the best example I’ve seen so far where gamification is extremely effective.”

This typing game appears to fall more into the game-based learning category.

There is obviously overlap between the two pedagogies, but game-based learning as it is practiced today typically involves an off-the-shelf video or board game while gamification tends to be more IRL or bootstrapped to an LMS.

So—which is more effective?

As broad as both categories might be, a significant body of research exists on both subjects. One can find 421 articles that touch on GBL on JSTOR, while 234 mention gamification. That body continues to grow, and much more is needed before one can discuss either with absolute certainty.

But as things stand, a few conclusions have begun to materialize.

Gamification Is Effective if Well-Designed

Gamification expert Yu-kai Chou has been working on gamification since 20013. He maintains a website on the subject and regularly compiles successful examples. As an advocate, these examples are no doubt cherry-picked to some degree. But considering the sheer volume, it’s hard to argue with the stats. Check here for over 90 examples of successful corporate gamification examples.

For a different perspective, see video game designer Ian Bogost’s blog post on why “Gamification Is Bulls***.” Don’t let the title fool you—Bogost has a Phd on the subject and is well regarded in the community. And his argument is a compelling case against some of the flashier instances of the practice.

Supporting Bogost, researchers at Gartner found in 2012 that 80% of gamification efforts fail to meet business objectives.

A key quality of gamification is that onus is on an educator or a smaller educational content provider to design the game. That means less time, lower budgets, and fewer resources. As a result, a good many studies tend to find lukewarm results. Many qualities of gamification, such as digital badges, certainly won’t improve learning on their own.

So—What About Game-Based Learning?

On the flip side, educators like to use games such as Minecraft, Civilization, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even Tomb Raider to enhance their lessons. Compared to gamification, game-based learning tends to have a wider consensus for its efficacy.

“I think we’re lucky enough at this point,” said Benjamin Kelly, who teaches technology in a rural district in New Brunswick, Canada. He has been creating Minecraft-based learning modules for years. “You have to be living under a rock to not know what Minecraft is and not know the power it has over kids. If anything, the questions I’m getting are ‘Why do you let them play so much Minecraft?’ Or “Why are kids on Minecraft at school and at home?’”

“One of the greatest comments ever came from one of my own child’s teachers, who said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m ok with kids playing Minecraft because it’s so engaging, it makes everything else in school less engaging for them.’ So you can imagine sitting there as a Minecraft mentor, the biggest smile came over my face. Because the obvious answer is, well, it sounds like someone needs Minecraft in school.”

But while this difference in public attitude exists, it’s possible that game-based learning has benefitted from a lopsided dynamic. With gamification, it’s up to educators to make their learning module more entertaining. With game-based learning, those educators must take an already highly entertaining game and make it educational. Educators—by definition—are trained to educate first and entertain second. In this sense, the average teacher might want to stick with their strengths. That said, countless teachers excel in the entertainment department. When strategically choosing between GBL and gamification, therefore, any teacher needs to involve some honest self-assessment before proceeding.

Cover Image: Paul Kadysz, Unsplash.

The post Gamification vs. Game-Based Learning–Which Is More Effective? appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Online modules and eLearning have begun to change the way in which safety managers deliver occupational safety and health administration (OSHA training) to workers in hazardous environments. Some efforts have brought their lessons online to allow for cheaper and more convenient training. But according to Erica Schaffel, VP of Sales at PIXO, that doesn’t do much to improve efficacy.

“Right now, there are two ways you can get your OSHA training,” Schaffel said over the phone. “You can take an online class or there’s the one-time class were a person comes out and conducts it. We all know what the retention rates are when you read something or you sit through a lecture. People don’t really hang on to that over the long term or internalize its importance.”

In response to this need, PIXO has developed a gamified VR OSHA training module. During the development process, Schaffel and her team have unearthed a few things about OSHA training.

“In talking to safety managers and training managers over the past few years, there were a few things that everyone sort of had in common,” Schaffel said. “The three biggest challenge facing these managers are 1) they’re looking to create a culture of safety, 2) they don’t really know how to change employee behavior, and 3) there’s an aging workforce. The new generation of workers are looking and hoping to learn differently. So we are a really natural fit for that.”

PIXO and Their Big Pivot

The company hasn’t always been in the occupational safety line of work. Just a few years ago, they were developing mobile apps for businesses.

“PIXO has actually been around for 9 years,” Schaffel said. “We started out building mobile apps and then about two and a half years ago our CEO Sean Hurwitz saw virtual reality really starting to come to life. He foresaw it was going to become very useful. So he decided to pivot the entire company. He hired what he saw as a VR dream team that would be able to go out into the world of enterprise VR and see what would happen. Two years ago this was all still really new.”

“We didn’t really know what this was going to be. But since we had a gaming background, he took a different strategy. A lot of the enterprise VR companies in the field today are filled with engineers but Hurwitz hired a lot of AAA gaming professionals and enterprise software architects.”

But at that point, PIXO simply knew they wanted to move into the VR space. They didn’t know exactly where the company would be a few years down the road.

“We landed on a training opportunity for a very large energy company and the team really saw an opportunity there. [We understood that] VR could be used to provide training that there was no other way to give.”

“[After doing that for a while] we learned a couple of things: 1) people don’t want a single lesson in VR, they want a lot, 2) the cost of custom virtual reality is too high for most companies. To give you an idea, it can be anywhere from $50,000 to Walmart, who paid $5 million for theirs.  So if you’re talking about a lot of training, it can get really expensive for most companies.”

“We decided we needed to build a platform. We needed a way to build these modules more efficiently and deliver them to scale.  We also realized that we really needed a content library. We needed to have a lot of VR content that we could offer people for a couple thousand dollars instead of hundreds of thousands.”

“This all happened about a year ago. So the team decided to put their heads down and focus and build the basis of a content library so that’s where we are today. Our platform has a core set of features as well as a delivery system to be able to scale quickly for large enterprises. And we also have a couple of modules (this is really new, the platform was finished a couple of months ago).”

Disrupting OSHA Training

“In interviewing mine workers or people at manufacturing plants or people who work in nuclear reactors, one thing that a lot people said is, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Sometimes I don’t feel like I need to follow all of these safety practices.’”

“On the other side of that, the people who were the most interesting said ‘I follow these rules every single time and I’ve seen what happens first hand,’ you know, like ‘I fell, I got injured, or my friend got injured.’ VR is a great platform to reinforce these regulations in a way that helps people understand the consequences of not following them and help them internalize how important they are.”

PIXO’s OSHA VR training is gamified, that’s for sure. But still, the tone still needs to be appropriate for training that might save someone’s life.

“Our gaming background means that we bring a very specific set of expertise to the table. It doesn’t mean that we’re making OSHA training as fun as playing soccer. It means that we know how to build really beautiful, expansive, immersive worlds in which the VR training takes place. It also means that we know what really drives engagement other than something being fun. So if you look at the term ‘gamification,’ it means the application of different elements of gameplay including things like point scoring, competition with others, and other rules of play. All of our modules do incorporate those traditional gamification aspects. They are multi-participant so you can collaborate or compete with others. And there are rules to whatever VR training you are engaged in.”

“In terms of engagement there are things we do with every single VR training we build that are relatively unique. Every module we build has an element of randomization. In the OSHA module, for example, there are over 1 million randomized aspects. So it’s engaging not just the first time but over time. Everyone has their own unique experience. Every time you complete that training, it’s going to be completely different.”

PIXO also currently offers VR training for gas meter operations and maintenance. If everything goes according to plan, they will soon have built a library of VR training modules targeting the manufacturing, energy, and first responder sectors.

The post How PIXO Decided to Develop a Gamified VR OSHA Training Module, and Why It’s Better than Your Typical Safety Course appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Special education stands as a constant question mark for K-12+ administrators. This branch in any institution faces more challenges than any other department and is the recipient of a huge amount of budget dollars. Learners with dyslexia track with their peers in many subjects and aspects of the learning process, but reading is a struggle. What if there was a way to help out dyslexic learners without diverting the same amount of educators’ time and schools’ resources? That’s where Dyslexia Dragon comes in.

Last week, the company announced that it had helped develop a new education and gaming platform intended to help dyslexic learners acquire skills to face the unique challenges with which they struggle in the classroom and in society at large. Dyslexia Dragon is a gamified program that focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary at multiple levels, areas where learners with dyslexia typically struggle.

HeyPayless, a software development company operating in the U.S. and the U.K., took care of the game design. “Our friends at Dyslexia Dragon wished to build a game that could integrate different levels of educational training for children with disability as per the different skill-sets required for their development.” said Riken Shah, Owner of HeyPayless, according to a release. “With our experience in engineering gaming development for the modern generation, we had the expertise to build the perfect eLearning platform.”

Connecting Speech with the Written and Printed Word

According to the Mayo Clinic’s online resources, dyslexia is “a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words.” It presents an issue with decoding language: a dyslexic learner might speak fluently and have the same capacity for abstract, language-based thought as someone who does not live with the condition. When it comes to translating the written code of language into the spoken word (and vice versa), however, dyslexic learners struggle more than most students. It does not affect general intelligence.

Most people with dyslexia display the same or similar speech abilities as the average learner. Accordingly, Dyslexia Dragon includes both written and oral components to help learners connect what comes naturally to them to what they struggle with.

Dyslexia Doesn’t Just Affect Reading

Most, if not all classrooms, after all, rely primarily on print and the written word as the method of teaching their students. A dyslexic learner likely not only struggles with reading, but also with subjects like science and math because so much of the information in each is conveyed via print.

Gamified teaching aids like Dyslexia Dragon offer a huge potential for learners dealing with the condition. To begin, it removes the social stigma that many learners feel when they struggle more with a given subject than their peers. Many dyslexic learners develop social problems as well, such as low self-esteem, anxiety, and even aggression in response to their struggles with reading comprehension. By allowing learners a private setting to face their problems head on allows them to avoid more public displays of their difficulties.

Much research has also shown that gamified eLearning modules can significantly increase student engagement. Many teachers struggle to keep their students’ attention directed at print-based material in the first place. But with dyslexic learners, that becomes even more of a challenge. In order to teach learners with dyslexia, teachers already often translate their lessons into other media. A gamified learning platform stands as an effective alternative.

The Potential of eLearning in Special Ed

Many special education initiatives have seen great success with gaming platforms targeting other special needs.

The Geneva Centre for Autism, for example, has offered a significant amount of online initiatives in both autism awareness and educational resources for teachers for the past ten years.

Google’s latest augmented reality (AR) product, Glass Enterprise, furthermore, is now being used to help autistic children understand facial expressions.

This is not to say that dyslexia and autism are at all related. Instead, example after example proves that eLearning, edtech, and online programs pose the ability to target groups of learners dealing with a specific issue. In many districts, the number of special needs learners stands far in the minority. But over a large population, these learners make up a significant body. In these cases the scalability of technology allows for massive changes to the way we approach special education.

The post Dyslexia Dragon Develops a Gamified Platform to Help Learners Read and Spell appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Among eLearning initiatives across the board, it seems today like it’s a question of gamify or go home. Whether the task at hand is to teach children in rural China to code or to onboard the latest fry cook at your local KFC, everything is better in game form.

But, for the eLearning Brothers, these specific gamified modules were small town farm league stuff. This fall, they partnered with the Game Agency to create the world’s first customizable gamified eLearning arcade. They officially launched in late October.

The Training Arcade hosts a library of, well, games. These games tend to be simple, and combine player finesse with problem solving and memory recall. Instructors can select a variety of these and customize them (with the help of the program’s online editor) for a specific subject, class, or course.

[Maze – The Training Arcade from The Game Agency on Vimeo]

As learners play, learn, and engage with the course material, the Training Arcade tracks their progress and provides instructors with leaderboards and analytics in real time.

“We’re so excited to partner with eLearning Brothers on the launch of The Training Arcade,” said Joseph McDonald, managing partner at the Game Agency in a statement. “[We] couldn’t be more thrilled to bring our game development experience including the treasure trove of great games to the entire L&D world at prices everyone can afford.”

Learn as you game

Instructors can program their modules so that their gaming students must periodically answer a fill-in-the-blank, a multiple choice question, or take a quiz. In some cases, this involves simply interjecting a question in the middle of a game.

The game “Jump,” for example, requires the player to move between shifting platforms on the screen to get higher and higher. Amid gameplay, “Questions can be asked via text, images, or videos and the answers can take the form of multiple choice, scrambles, pull-downs, and many others,” according to the Training Arcade site. “Correct answers reward players with super boosts, points, and lives. Beware of falling objects, which are also customizable to correlate with learning themes.”

Gamified eLearning in any setting

The Training Arcade can be employed in just about any eLearning scenario imaginable. The games are intended for play by all ages and can apply to training in any setting.

Companies also have the option to change up the layout and design of each game to insert their logo and brand appropriately.

“In the past, eLearning has contained glorified quizzes at best,” said eLearning Brothers President Curtis Morley. “Now, everyone can include amazing games that would rank high on any app store because of their fun and addictive nature. People really enjoy playing these games. This is the future of gamification in eLearning.”

All games comply with SCORM standards so it can integrate with other eLearning software, most learning management systems (LMS), or shared online. The programs are also mobile native. Games can be played on all devices, at home, in the classroom, or on the go.

According to eLearning Brothers Co-Founder Andrew Scivally, “It has been known for years that the more engaged a learner is the more effective the learning will be. These games engage the learner on a totally new level. The leaderboards add to the stickiness of the game and the competitiveness of the learners. Learners really have to know the material if they want to hold the title of ‘High Score’ in the office.”

The post If You Build It, They Will Game: The Training Arcade and the Future of Gamified eLearning appeared first on eLearningInside News.

The generation of people that has come to be known as the Millennials has received much attention in recent years. This is understandable given that they are now the largest living generation and are also making up an ever-growing percentage of the workforce. And while much has been said about Millennials in the workplace, businesses have been slow to cater to their needs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the learning and training departments in corporations. It makes good business sense for employers to start focusing more on eLearning for these tech-savvy digital natives, but if they don’t tailor their eLearning efforts to Millennials, their chances of getting the desired results will be slim at best. One initiative in particular a growing number of employers are utilizing is gamifying Millennial eLearning. But what does that really mean, and what are the specific ways successful companies are making it happen?

Why Gamifying Millennial eLearning Works

Professionals who are older than Millennials can understand why gamification of eLearning has been slow to pick up speed. There are plenty of managers and leaders out there who think these young people already play enough games without purposely bringing gaming into the workplace. To them it sounds more like a recipe that would guarantee non-productivity. But this way of thinking is just a denial of reality: Millennials are steeped in gaming, they think it’s valuable, and gamification works.

Millennials, perhaps more than any other generation, grew up with video games, and not just in the form of dedicated gaming consoles such as Playstation, Nintendo and Xbox. They play games on their PCs and mobile devices as well. While just over half of American adults play video games (53%), that figure skyrockets to 81% among the age group that falls within the boundaries of Millennials (source). But besides the fact that gaming is hugely popular among Millennials, even more relevant is how easily they relate gaming to the workplace and skill development. As John Zogby noted several years ago in Forbes, 67% of Millennials think gaming teaches them how to establish winning strategies, 70% think it helps them become better problem-solvers, 63% say it enhances their teamwork abilities, and nearly a third have an online avatar. Gamifying Millennial eLearning will make them feel right at home.

But gamification in eLearning applies to more than just Millennials. Lots of people enjoy gamification, even if they don’t think of themselves as gamers in the same way Millennials do. Think about all the different rewards programs people belong to, from frequent flyer miles to a coffee shop loyalty card – these are gamification in action throughout your everyday life. Keeping track of health stats with a FitBit. The instant feedback you get on fuel economy based on how drive in some hybrid cars. These are all different ways that gamification is applied in everyday life, and people of all ages find that they enjoy it.

The neuroscience behind why gamification works isn’t hard to understand. Each time you reach a new achievement level, you feel a little rush of excitement and pleasure. Your brain gets the message that what you just did to accomplish something is worth pursuing. What’s happening in the brain and body is the release of various feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. In the same way that people experience a “runner’s high,” gamification of eLearning can create lots of positive associations with learning and even training as learners are rewarded with each achievement.

With this understanding of how gamifying Millennial eLearning works, what are specific ways employers and learning companies are making it happen?

Gamifying the Deloitte Leadership Academy

Consulting and professional services giant Deloitte is one global company that has taken gamifying Millennial eLearning seriously by gamifying its online Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA). Each learning content chunk is presented as a “mission” to be completed, and new participants begin with a short on-boarding mission to get the lay of the land. Upon completion, users receive a badge. They can then personalize their DLA experience by connecting to personal social media networks and uploading a profile and photo. This kind of customization increases engagement. Completing additional missions grants more badges, some of which are “secret” badges that pop up unexpectedly when certain conditions are met, and few things delight users more than a surprise achievement. The platform also has a leaderboard concept built into it, but it’s more than the typical simple display of the top ten user scores for the overall platform. Those can be counter-productive when the same superstar users dominate the leaderboard, which demotivates others who know they’ll never catch up or surpass those leaders. Instead, DLA users compete with others who are at their same overall level such that each level of participants has its own top-ten leaderboard. And all the leaderboards are reset every 7 days, which means everyone has a chance each week to be the top learner at their level, which helps prevent attrition when users miss a week or two for whatever reason. Results for Deloitte’s gamification efforts have been impressive: DLA participants are spending more time on the site, returning more often each week, are completing programs in ever-increasing numbers.

McDonald’s Gamifies Cash Register Training

Few things could seem more mundane or boring as being trained on how to use a cash register at McDonald’s. When the global fast-food giant rolled out a new “till system” as it’s called in the UK, it knew it needed to do something to make training more exciting and allow leaners to make mistakes in an environment that wouldn’t include real customers. Gamification provided the solution. McDonald’s partnered with City & Guilds Kineo to make the till training into a game that was fun, purposeful, and highly effective. The game is a real-time simulation of taking customer orders in a timed environment along with questions to assess knowledge. Game goals and awards include getting orders 100% correct, “3 on the bounce” (getting three orders correct in a row), beating the clock, and keeping the customer satisfaction meter high. McDonald’s was very happy with the results. It was the chain’s first attempt to gamify learning, and it worked. The game remains the most popular employee portal page ever, and 85% of users believe it really helped them understand the new system and helped boost their future performance. The business results included faster till service and high customer spends.

Gamifying the Company LMS

For companies that subscribe to a Learning Management System (LMS), gamifying Millennial eLearning could be as simple as switching vendors. Many of them have started incorporating gamification principles into their products, but the quality of these offerings varies widely. One of the best examples in this regard is The Academy LMS from Growth Engineering in the UK. It includes the basic gamification elements of points, badges, leaderboards and levels, but it does all of them really well. And the secret sauce is their use of a superhero theme and superhero avatars. Superheroes are hot right now with Millennials as seen with all the TV shows and movies based on comic book superheroes, and The Academy LMS manages to do it without it seeming overly cheesy. Just about everything in this LMS ties in explicitly to the gamification aspects, so it doesn’t feel like an “add-on” thrown in for good measure to satisfy a fad. Even content authors have their gamification in which to participant, which is a very novel aspect for any LMS. The vendor also keeps adding and modifying gamification features, keeping the gamification aspects fresh and ever-changing. And it even includes the capability to work in real-world rewards based on learning achievement. The sky is the limit here, from company swag to special parking privileges, a sit-down with the CEO, a day-off pass, gift cards – the more creative a company is with these offerings, the better.

Gamifying Millennial eLearning is more than the mere fad many have made it out to be. Far from it, gamification may very well be one of the most essential keys to unlock the door to Millennial engagement and retention in the workplace. When done well, gamification of eLearning can boost workforce productivity while giving employees a much-needed dose of fun even as they’re getting better at what they need to do. That sounds like a winning combination any business would be pleased to offer. Companies who aren’t at least thinking about this are already behind the curve. Those who proactively make it happen stand to reap multiple benefits that will have a positive impact on not just their learning and training goals, but their bottom-line operations as well.

The post Gamifying Millennial eLearning: The Why and How of Making it Happen appeared first on eLearningInside News.