GAMIFICATION & SERIOUS GAMES IN HEALTH by PHARMAGEEK

4 Effective Gamification Strategies for Corporate Training

How do game-based learning, gamification, and eLearning designers learn ways to increase engagement and effectiveness in corporate training? By looking at popular games! Here we look at the wildly successful Candy Crush Saga to teach us 4 effective gamification design strategies for your next learning game project.

http://elearningindustry.com/4-effective-gamification-strategies-for-corporate-training

[KEY POINTS]

1.  Define Your “Monetization” Strategy

How does having a monetization strategy apply to corporate training? Well, we typically call this return-on-investment (ROI). What business goals are you trying to meet? What performance is needed to meet those goals? How will you know when you've achieved them. If you don't have a clear set of goals and a clear way of measuring against those goals, you could spend lots of money with no way of determining your success.

2.  Focus on Content Mastery and Job Performance, Not Game Play

In any learning intervention, we want learners to become with fluent with the content (be it product knowledge, new system tasks, etc.). Then, when they've mastered the content, we want them to translate that knowledge into actual job performance. 

A question that sometimes comes up is how many times learners should be able to replay a level (or the game as a whole) to improve their scores in learning games.

3.  Make Sure Game Reward Systems Translate to the Real World

Design your learning game mechanics, such as your reward systems, to translate to the real world. Point values are an example. Typically, point values are abstractions, and the conventional wisdom is that more is better. So, earning 1,000 points is more motivating than earning 100 points. I think it's better to align your gamification design and reward system to something tangible, recognizable, and translatable to the real world.  

4.     Think Outside the Game “Box”

Think broadly about how you define your learning “game. At the end of the day, you want to tie the game's learning to the real work. So, think about how you can integrate your company's existing tools into your gamification design. It might be social media tools, like Facebook or Yammer, or productivity tools that you “pull in” to the learning game. For instance, if you're using a learning game to build speed and accuracy with your customer service reps, you can let them “level up” inside the game once they've achieved a certain level of real performance on the job.

As designers of gamification in learning, we can – and should – pay attention to trends in the wider world of gaming, and find the “sweet spots” we can apply to performance improvement and meeting business objectives using learning games.