There is an unruly mass of deadly dull eLearning platforms out there. Learning Management Systems designed with the base level of functionality in mind. The general approach is as follows: login and plug away. The problem, for most users, is that this offers all the appeal of a minor head-cold. Growth Engineering hold that the learning experience should interest and engage the student – not put them to sleep. Is it so much to ask that our learning experience should be fun?

We have built an Academy Platform LMS that draws on one of society’s best engagement engines: gaming. By introducing game mechanics to the world of online learning, we can ensure our students are hooked – emotionally and intellectually. The focus is on effective edutainment, not lecturing or preaching. Imagine you had access to a platform that could re-ignite your desire for self-development. That could add extra layers of motivation to your desire for knowledge.

This may sound like some kind of Utopian ideal, but we believe that we have cracked it. We have created a Platform that does something incredible: it makes the user’s learning journey fun. What follows is our research on how gamification can be applied to Academy Platforms in order to make the eLearning experience significantly more palatable.

Gamification is much more than a marketing tool. As implemented on our Academy Platform LMS it is capable of engineering unprecedented levels of user engagement.

The fear is that gamification will help exacerbate a reward-based culture. That’s to say, we won’t be motivated to act unless it will generate a reward. We won’t do something like give to charity, unless there’s something in it for us. There’s no motivation to learn unless we’re simultaneously earning points (or something equivalent).

But hasn’t this always been the case? If we’re not motivated to act, we wont act. If we don’t provide our learners with motivation, they won’t learn. Learners are motivated by the reward of knowledge and the potential for self-improvement. Gamification is an attempt to provide further motivation and engineer more engagement from learners. To that extent, it’s something that should be embraced, not rejected.

Just like the video-game industry, gamification – the use of gaming mechanics in non-gaming environments – is growing in popularity. By marrying eLearning with gamification we seek to create a learning platform that is more engaging. We want more individuals to complete eLearning courses. Thus, we have to build a platform that can provide them with the motivation, match their ability levels and offer the right triggers.

By satisfying our basic needs for reward, status, achievement, self-expression and competition, gamifying Academy Platforms can provide ample motivation. By regulating the difficulty level and adopting a game-like relationship to failure, eLearning can ensure that all users are capable of finishing every course. Finally, gamification can provide ‘triggers’ or calls to action that amount to the final piece of the behavioural puzzle.

With all these elements in place within our Academy Platform LMS, we can help determine individuals to complete eLearning courses. By raising engagement we can increase productivity. The result is an entirely new level of motivation that can be layered on top of the motivation to learn and the desire for self-development. It is a key tool to aid people development and growth. Growth Engineering are pioneers on this relatively new and fertile ground, but the results speak for themselves.

Gamification is the key to engagement!

Video games are masterful in their ability to find the right difficulty level to engage their user. The aim is to create something that is challenging enough to generate some sense of accomplishment when objectives are met. But it must also be accessible enough to prevent the frustration that comes with constant failure. Growth Engineering’s Academy Platform LMS has strived to find the perfect level of difficulty and a sensible relationship with failure.

The great majority of us have a very low tolerance level towards failure. If there’s no tangible award for succeeding and we keep failing, most of us are likely to give up. The aim is to get a user to complete an eLearning course and earn some kind of reward. It’s essential that failure doesn’t turn them away.

The crux of most games is repeated experimentation. If I try this, what happens? What about if I try this? The only way to complete a game is to fail at it repeatedly and learn what you should have done to progress as a result. Games are successful in this regard because they recast failure as a positive thing. Failing has no major consequences. If you ‘die’ in the game, you don’t die in real life. In most cases you don’t even have to start the game again from the very beginning.

Gamers also have recourse to ‘instant feedback’. When they fail, they automatically know why. It’s because they failed to complete this task, or weren’t good enough to overcome a particular obstacle. Through trial and error it’s possible to reach a solution. Furthermore, the accomplishment is all the more rewarding for the effort put in.

Our Academy Platform LMS utilises these game mechanics and reframes failure as a necessary part of learning. The consequences of failure should not be too severe. Minor failures should not prevent a user from earning some kind of virtual reward. More importantly: users need instant feedback when they do fail to help them address gaps in their knowledge.

In this instance the Academy Platform LMS has an advantage over traditional classroom teaching. A teacher cannot go around a class individually explaining where each student went wrong. But an Academy Platform LMS can be programmed to do exactly this. When a user slips up, they know exactly why they did so. They know where the gap in their knowledge is and they know all this instantly.

All of which combines to create a more efficent and entertaining learning journey for our users.

At Growth Engineering we’re experts at concocting engagement. Our Platform is designed to keep learners transfixed and motivated. Fogg’s behavioural model documents how certain behaviours can be determined. The three key elements involved here are:

• Motivation
• Ability
• Triggers

Provide all three at the same time and targeted behaviours can be determined. Thus, to determine a user to finish one of our eLearning courses, they must be motivated, capable and triggered.

So how do we get our learners motivated? As human-beings we are motivated by the potential to satisfy certain basic needs. The need for reward, status, accomplishment, self-expression and competition provides plenty of motivational thrust. Game mechanisms are adept at satisfying these needs. It’s the perfect need satisfaction cycle.

People need to be rewarded and encouraged for their endeavours. We don’t work for free and when we do a good job we expect something in return. Without praise or the potential for promotion, there’s no motivation to continue performing. eLearning is no different in this regard. Our Academy Platform LMS recognises this. It offers rewards badges and certificates as you progress. It also recognises the effort you put in: the harder you work, the bigger and better the reward.

This helps foster a sense of meeting and overcoming challenge that is not only satisfactory in and of itself, but also provides it’s own virtual rewards. These trinkets may seem insignificant at first, but they act as markers of your achievements. They have value because you worked to obtain them.

One benefit that Learning Management Systems have over traditional classroom learning is the potential for immediate feedback. There’s no waiting for your teacher to mark your work and return it to you. Instead, you are informed immediately and often educated as to the correct answer. Our Gamification functionality reflects this sense of immediacy by offering the right reward at the right moment.

The points, badges or awards that you collect as you pass through eLearning courses are indicators of your status. The more points you have the better. That’s the thrust of any game with a high-score table. We all want to be the best we can. We want to earn as many rewards as possible. This is how we bolster our own status. Gamification is our chance to transcribe this basic human need onto the world of eLearning.

Growth Engineering’s Academy Platform LMS offers you a chance to capture a personalised piece of yourself on the internet. It provides an opportunity for learners to demonstrate their expertise to their peers. Pouring yourself into the project gives you a real sense of self-development. This social element is a key motivational factor and you’ll be surprise just how effective it can be.

A Learning Management System allows the eLearning individual to benchmark themselves against other individuals. This changes the playing field significantly. eLearning is no longer a lonely and desolate task. Games as a rule are good at weaving a tight social fabric. But it’s the competitive edge that gamification inspires that the Academy Platform LMS should look to master.

Introducing gamification features onto Academy Platforms is pivotal to answering the regular criticisms of online learning. But what exactly is gamification?

Loosely defined, gamification “is the application of gaming mechanics to non-gaming environments”. It’s an attempt to take all the things we like about games – the fun factor, the challenges, the potential for rewards, etc. and apply them to situations or scenarios we usually find hard-going.

We regularly come across instances of gamification throughout our daily life.  More than 180m members are signed-up to a frequent flyer programme where their allegiance earns them some reward, or status within certain airlines. All the major supermarkets offer some kind of loyalty card. Foursquare offers ‘awards’ for signing in at certain locations.

A fun example is the ‘Speed Camera Lottery’. The idea here was to try to make driving the speed limit ‘fun’. To pull off this feat a Speed Camera was set-up and configured to capture the registration numbers of both those who broke the speed limit and those who drove under the limit.Those caught speeding would pay a fine as normal which would be entered into a pot. Those who adhered to the regulations were entered into a lottery to win the proceeds. This resulted in a 22% reduction in speed whilst the camera was erected.

Gamification can make driving at sensible speeds fun. By applying gamification to an Academy Platform LMS similar results have followed. That’s why Growth Engineering’s Academy Platform LMS is positively brimming with gamification functionality.

Since its inception, eLearning has faced a barrage of criticism suggesting that this ‘comfortable base’ is unachievable outside of the classroom. This is the belief that eLearning fails to transmit emotion or engage the student in a way that human teachers can. Growth Engineering’s Academy Platform LMS provides a welcome counter-point. It compensates in all the right ways and stimulates the learner – emotionally and intellectually.

Here’s where gamification creeps in. Compare the process of trawling through reams of text on a computer screen to playing a modern video game. Which would you prefer? Video-games are designed to appeal to basic human needs. That includes our need for reward, self-expression and status. Gaming satisfies these needs in a way that reading through text and taking in the occasional image fails to do. Gamifying an Academy Platform LMS is the process of transcribing games’ power to appeal to our human needs onto the world of online learning.

There is an unruly mass of deadly dull eLearning platforms out there. Learning Management Systems designed with the base level of functionality in mind. The general approach is as follows: login and plug away. The problem, for most users, is that this offers all the appeal of a minor head-cold. We believe that learning does not have to be a drag. Growth Engineering hold that the learning experience should interest and engage the student – not put them to sleep. Is it so much to ask that our learning experience should be fun?

We have built an Academy Platform LMS that draws on one of society’s best engagement engines: gaming. By introducing game mechanics to the world of online learning, we can ensure our students are hooked – emotionally and intellectually. The focus is on effective edutainment, not lecturing or preaching. Imagine you had access to a platform that could re-ignite your desire for self-development. That could add extra layers of motivation to your desire for knowledge.

This may sound like some kind of Utopian ideal, but we believe that we have cracked it. We have created a Platform that does something incredible: it makes the user’s learning journey fun. What follows is our research on how gamification can be applied to Academy Platforms in order to make the eLearning experience significantly more palatable.

The influence of video-games and gaming culture is profound. It has infiltrated mainstream culture. It has begun to affect the way we think and react in non-gaming circumstances. Gamification seeks to take the gaming mechanisms that we find appealing and apply them to scenarios that often fail to absorb us. eLearning is often accused of stimulating disinterest in the user. Our Academy Platform LMS redresses the balance by adopting revolutionary levels of gamification.

There are 10.2 million paying subscribers to Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. $775m was dropped on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 during its first five days in US shops. To put this in perspective, Hollywood record-breaker Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, which holds the worldwide opening weekend record, pulled in just $483.2m during its first three days on general release. The video game industry is a veritable, pixelated behemoth engulfing all in its path. Growth Engineering have taken the key things that appeal about these video-games and applied it to their Academy Platform LMS. We have embraced gamification.

A case study showing the impact for Bensons for Beds on the launching of their own Bensons Academy. With 300+ retail stores they had a need to radically change their L&D structure. They needed to deliver a company wide change communication programme as well as a significant cost saving. Find out how they did this.

What is a sales academy?

• A sales academy is a holistic approach to the training and development of sales teams and aims to raise the standards of performance by:
• Clarifying what ‘good’ looks like: benchmarking individual performance and knowledge through a sales competency framework
• Creating training that focuses on the needs of the individuals, rather than ‘one size fits all’
• Creating training that engages the staff and encourages a high level of participation
• Ensuring training engages users through knowledge sharing, competition elements such as leader boards and ‘gamification’ tactics that enhance development
• Gathering regular feedback to ensure the integrated programme is ‘owned’ by the sales organisation
• Measuring results through return on investment (ROI).

In tight times, Learning and Development budget has traditionally been one of the first areas for businesses to cut spending, and times have seldom been as tight as they are now in living memory. Return on investment for learning has always been hard to demonstrate, which explains why it’s always been so hard to defend from cuts, and yet in many ways, the need for learning is currently greater than ever. Even in organisations where belief in the benefits of development is low, the requirement for learning is still high.

This articles explores how budgets can be maximised through the use of Learning technologies.

What’s the hard evidence that a blended learning approach can deliver benefits?

Well, when American Express conducted a study of the ROI on different types of training for 2000 of their managers, they found that blended learning delivered a 12% increase in productivity, as against a 10% increase for instructor led training. This may not sound like a huge increase, but when you consider that the blended learning cost approximately 1/3rd less, the ROI on the blended learning was an impressive 1,599%, against 972% for instructor led training This equates, in ROI terms, to the blended learning approach being 75% more effective than instructor led training making it crystal clear that this approach must be at the root of improving ROI for Learning and Development.