Over the past years, e-learning and online education have grown rapidly. However, it has not been easy to keep students motivated and engaged to finish courses. That’s where gamification and game design elements embedded into Learning Management Systems (LMS) can really help.

The Promise and Potential of Gamification

Gamification is the use of game mechanics and reward systems to engage people, motivate them further and increase participation in experiences that otherwise would have no games. There is significant untapped potential for LMS development services to use it in education, especially inside LMS platforms.

Improved Completion Rates

The most direct benefit of gamification is a significantly higher course and program completion rate. When we get rewards, dopamine is released, making that addictive. 

According to research, completion rates doubled from 15% when basic gamification elements were added to their training courses.

Long-Term User Retention

Gamification also encourages students to stick with an LMS for a longer term. It creates positive associations and makes learning feel more rewarding and compelling.

Research showed that 7 out of 10 students felt more motivated to complete gamified training courses. They were also 9 times more likely to return to the LMS frequently when game elements were incorporated.

Supports Varied Learning Preferences

People have diverse learning styles. Some thrive in highly competitive environments with public leaderboards. Others prefer more private systems focused on their progress.

Gamification allows LMS platforms to support different groups’ preferences simultaneously. Students can be streamed into game frameworks optimized for how they learn best.

Key Gamification Elements to Energize LMS Design

Several game mechanics and frameworks have proven particularly effective when applied creatively in LMS platforms. These include:

1. Points Systems

One of the simplest gamification elements is points, which are awarded for completing tasks, content, or activities. Displaying point totals on scoreboards taps into people’s competitive drive and provides a sense of achievement as point tallies grow.

Points systems work best when milestones trigger rewards, new achievement levels, or unlock premium content. This creates a series of “mini-goals” that give a continuing sense of progress.

2. Challenge Quests

Quests or challenges turn learning into an adventure. Students embark on “missions” that require various activities to accomplish. When existing quests are completed, new quests are unlocked, driving ongoing participation.

Effective quests often have names and themes that fit an overarching storyline. For example, recruits on a mission to save their squad. This narrative quality helps further immerse and engage students.

3. Leaderboards

Leaderboards leverage peoples’ competitive instincts by publicly ranking engagement and progress. Top performers are lauded with status and recognition. Leaderboards encourage both individuals and teams to push harder to outperform their peers.

However, some people don’t enjoy public comparisons. It’s important leaderboards remain optional. Students focused on personal progress should have alternatives available.

4. Level Progression

Level progression gives a powerful sense of advancement as students develop new skills and abilities. Transition rituals like tests or challenges between levels enhance the excitement.

Layering learning into stages or levels allows course objectives to align with milestone achievements. Each level prepares trainees for the next through sequenced content unlocking.

5. Reward Systems

Reward systems reinforce desired behaviors. They release motivating dopamine hits to the brain when users accomplish tasks, challenges, or quests within the LMS.

Effective rewards provide satisfaction but remain unattainable without engaging in the platform. These may include points, badges, titles, privileges (like new avatars or content), prizes, or recognition.

6. Feedback Loops

Prompt feedback on student participation reinforces progress and areas for improvement, facilitating growth toward mastery of the subject matter.

For gamification environments, feedback loops should highlight achievements and new opportunities unlocked by advancement. This spurs further engagement. Public displays, like progress bars, add motivation through social accountability.

Gamification Best Practices For LMS Integration

While the possibilities of gamification are exciting, implementation missteps are common. Several best practices help avoid pitfalls when incorporating game elements into LMS platforms.

Ensure Game Design Aligns With Learning Objectives

Gamification should further – not hinder – learning goals. Game elements are not ends in themselves but tools to motivate progress towards mastery. They must closely support desired skills and knowledge acquisition.

Misalignments between gamification and academic outcomes are a recipe for failure. Learners enjoy the games but don’t gain competencies. Rigorous design thinking is vital to prevent this.

Provide Strong Onboarding & Orientation

Don’t assume learners immediately understand gamification environments. Comprehensively show them the “rules of the game” with onboarding quests introducing key elements before they begin.

Provide an orientation module guiding users through how game components work. Unlock access to the full gamified ecosystem only after prerequisite literacy is demonstrated.

Maintain High-Quality Gamification Design

Just as traditional eLearning content should adhere to established instructional design principles, gamified learning environments must uphold rigorous game design standards.

Key experts in the field, such as Professors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter, identify nine key gamification best practices, including actionable feedback, engagement curves that match learning curves, and the avoidance of extrinsic rewards for intrinsic motivations.

Incorporate Gamification Analytics

Data should drive ongoing optimization. Incorporate analytics tracking user behaviors and engagement within gamified environments. This reveals refinement opportunities to improve the achievement of target learning outcomes.

Game elements and reward mechanics are also supplied with analytics dashboards, which generate the highest motivation and completion rates. Further emphasis can be placed on these in future design iterations.

Support User Autonomy & Customization

While gamification is based on the structure and its established rules, at the same time, it allows players to be more flexible and personalized. Adult learners enjoy increasing their sense of autonomy, which helps their intrinsic motivation.

Customization gives users higher involvement in their learning journey. Choices support preferred reward mechanics, avatars, recognition displays, and quest selection. Personalization powers engagement.

Facilitate Social Connection

Humans are social creatures. Peer forums, mentor programs, teams, social sharing and 2 player gameplay enable learner interactions and collaboration to increase engagement.

Social connectivity reinforces the positive feelings that come from success and soothes the negative feelings of failure. It also keeps accountability in place when motivation dips.

What Lies Ahead?

As positive results and impact studies accumulate, more LMS platforms will integrate gamification and observably transform learner motivation as well as course and program completion rates.

This value is created across many contexts, including corporate training, higher education institutions, and boot camp-style coding academies. It also provides the power for the next generation of adaptive learning based on sophisticated algorithms behind gamification environments.

While gamification still has a long way to go before it’s able to make a significant impact on the eLearning, training and education sectors, writing is on the wall, and it will have a huge impact in the coming years. There is nothing they expect less.

Gamification elements will be the key to those platforms rising to the top. Motivation will engage and master 21st-century students along a rewarding upward spiral.