Engage and motivate your online learners with feedback and gamification?

Working with college students in a teacher education program, I’ve found many things to be useful: 1. Calling it “thoughts and support” or “thoughts and advice” seems to get around the hesitation many learners have about “feedback”. Put another way, “feedback” is the millennials/gen Z what red ink on a page is to boomers and gen X. 2. Use a medium of feedback based on my goals for the feedback and/or the student’s needs. Text can work great for low-level needs. Audio when tone is important. Screencast when I have to show a student multiple things about what they’ve built. 3. Practice and coaching about giving effective feedback, tied to the real world. All my students will need to give feedback as teachers themselves.

I agree that feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral in a professional setting. However, I don’t see how a student could receive negative or even neutral feedback from a teacher. Teachers are meant to guide students through their mistakes, provide correct options, and encourage students to make self-corrections. Learners are often happy to receiving corrections or indications of their errors, as this speeds up the learning process. Positive feedback is called praise. Good teachers generously commend their students, even for small achievements. Please note that I’m not discussing criticism from teachers, which is another aspect of this matter. Happy learning for everyone!

In the practice the most interesting way to engage and motivate students through feedback and gamification is collaboration. They become more consolidate and concise, they have challenge to deal with and, in the end, the important part is competition. Shortly, we make competition that would take place for e.g. next week, second class, plan and share activities and goals. After that class we would make small community competition and rate each other.

In the corporate realm, my language students were hesitant speakers. To demonstrate the power of feedback, I organized a mock meeting. Each student presented a brief in English. Their colleagues provided constructive feedback. 'Sara', initially nervous, received suggestions on clarity. She refined her content, practicing intonation. In the next mock meet, her poise and fluency amazed all. Feedback had not only boosted her skills but also her confidence.

I love using goal setting for giving feedback to students. The method I used was a Wildly Important Goal (WIG) much like a SMART goal which provides the students with the goal to be achieved, three ways in which to achieve it, a tracker to track the improvement and a deadline by which to achieve the goal. The WIG also provides an accountability partner who checks in with them to ensure they are on track with achieving their goal. Using an online LMS for student submissions of assignments, I can see all the assignments one after the other and can provide individual written feedback on each assignment and provide grades. I can also record voice notes to give words of encouragement, support and appreciation to the students.

Classroom Dojo is a perfect and productive choice for this. Try this out to improve behaviors and learning Giáp’s using gamification.

It’s been my experience that gamification can be fun and engaging, but needs to be thoughtfully used. One example is Kahoot - many kids get really excited…but the competitive kid(s) who never actually win get turned off pretty quickly.

I'm an Educational Drama specialist and I have used what I call "games" for 50 years in teaching special needs and English Language. Some people call them warmers, closers, fillers, activities and even tasks. But for me they must have an element of playfulness in them and also collaboration or competition with dynamics to keep learners engaged or motivated to stay and participate more, whatever their age, ability, nationality, religion or level. Thus they are inherently inclusive.

My advice is not to loose perspective! Gamification in the Western society triggers the comparison, the self assessment, the low esteem. Instead topics based on everyday life, movies watched in class, working environment and relationships practiced through dialogue, free intervention, guided dialogue through a set of questions where not the content but the grammar structures are relevant.

While gamification can be engaging, it might not always suit corporate language training. Professional contexts require focused learning, and excessive gamification could divert learners from language mastery. It's essential to balance engagement with effective skill-building to ensure tangible and relevant outcomes.

I remember once I sent a voice message on one of my students' speaking exercise and told her how excited I was when I listened to the way she explained the whole idea. I kept doing this for a while, and one day she sent a message to me and told me how encouraging those voice messages were and she changed her mind about pursuing studying English.

Students need to know they are improving. Without this their engagement is doomed. Gamification let’s them see they are achieving something and feedback gives insight into how they should proceed best. Together they are immensely powerful because the student is given encouragement to continue from someone they respect who is telling them they can grow.

A combination of timely, personalized feedback and gamification elements can significantly boost learner engagement and motivation in online courses. By creating an interactive and rewarding learning environment, educators can help learners stay focused and inspired throughout their online learning journey.

When used together, feedback and gamification can create a powerful synergy that enhances learners' motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. By providing learners with timely and specific feedback, and by making the learning experience more fun and rewarding through gamification, educators can create a more effective and enjoyable online learning environment.

Being strategic about connection and belonging are crucial for learning in general. It is especially critical to foster this in an online learning environment in which it can be a bit easier for students to disengage at times.

Amidst the virtual landscape, 'Paco' embarked on a language-learning journey. With precise objectives, I assessed his monthly essays, offering both commendations on vocabulary expansion and gentle pointers on grammar. The blend of written and recorded feedback kept him engaged. 'Paco's' commitment to improvement was evident as revised essays showcased enhanced fluency. Witnessing his progress affirmed that balanced and specific feedback fuels linguistic advancement.

+1 on timely feedback - and that’s a big strength of gamified approaches. We’ve been in a class where when we got feedback, it was so far removed from our work that it was essentially meaningless to us as learners. Therefore, if one can “level up” in a gamified system and get meaningful feedback more quickly, then the learning experience should be more effective overall.

Self assessment can be promoted through using mark schemes and sample candidate responses to encourage improvement of students' own work. I have found that this allows students to visualise concise answers and understand how to formulate their own answers in a better way.

To use feedback effectively in your online psychology courses, provide timely, specific, and constructive feedback. Use a variety of feedback types and encourage self-reflection to promote self-directed learning and increase motivation.

Where possible, instantaneous, concise and specific feedback to learners is often a keystone in the learning process. The more generic and over-complicated the feedback the less useful this is for the learners. This also has the danger of making any future that the learner receives in the same manner online, being given less attention and ignored. Ideally, where a learner is incorrect they should be given concise feedback as to why their answer is wrong. This may be following an incorrect method and pointing this out to them or a common misconception that you are able to debunk there and then before the learner proceeds.

Good online courses, with assessment, pass marks, evidence of growth and learning, always have an element of gamification. It is often just not intentional. The first benefit of thinking about gamification is that it allows us to be aware of and intentional about how we use gamification. This is always better than accidental, blind use of a really valuable tool. This might simply allow us to better understand what we are doing through our courses and why students are working through it well. It may also allow us to better understand the points at which students are losing interest or getting stuck. We can then consciously adapt game elements we already use, or add game elements that might facilitate greater success.

I find gamification helpful in encouraging online compliance training completion. Compliance training can be daunting to get 100% completion on, though required. Score cards showing completion by business area, function, department, etc. can help spur healthy competition to drive completion.

Gamification strategies like badges, leaderboards and points for participation tap into students' competitive nature, making learning interactive and fun. These student-centered techniques foster greater involvement, satisfaction and outcomes by empowering learners to monitor their progress. I use platforms like Kahoot for fast-paced quizzes, Classroomscreen for challenges and badges, roleplaying games for immersive learning, and gamified apps that reward with points and leaderboards. Integrating these gamification elements has significantly boosted engagement and enjoyment by turning learning into a captivating journey.

I've just recently completed a TEFL certification. The whole course is online. This is not a particularly successful implementation, but the bones are there. The whole progression and completion is tracked with tons of data: metrics for hours spent in each module, badges, points, leaderboards. It has very good gamification applications but there's that other part missing. The part where I get immediate feedback when answering a quiz and a chance to see why I made a mistake and be able to read the material again and answer correctly (feedforward). The course did feel like a game (against myself) really because I wanted (became psychologically fixated) to get the highest scores, and saw that I was reaching the top 10; the top 5; the top 3.

For hot feedback, incorporate interactive elements like a "Quick Reflex Challenge" where students must answer questions within a time limit. Immediate feedback in the form of points or rewards can be given based on accuracy and speed. This gamified approach keeps students engaged and motivated. For cold feedback, create a virtual quest, where groups of students embark on a journey to enhance their skills. After completing assignments, each student writes detailed feedback on the other group members with, for example, specific suggestions. By gamifying hot and cold feedback techniques in online courses, students are motivated to actively seek feedback, improve performance, and progress through the course's gamified elements.

In corporate language training, personalisation fosters genuine connections. Tailoring lessons to individuals' roles and industry-specific language needs enhances relevance. Addressing their unique challenges and goals shows that their growth matters. This approach not only accelerates learning but also motivates learners by acknowledging their distinct journey within the company context. Feedback is essential as it illuminates the path of improvement. It offers insights into strengths to amplify and areas to refine. Constructive feedback guides learners, ensuring they stay aligned with objectives. By bridging the gap between current and desired performance, feedback cultivates growth and fosters a culture of continuous enhancement.

As a former educator who now works in the video streaming industry, I'm curious about how increasingly more accessible and advanced real-time streaming, augmented reality, and virtual reality will change the landscape for interactive and gamified online education. Gone are the days when we played jeopardy in class to review for our history final (I'm looking at you 2001). Virtual classrooms that use augmented reality to bring history to life could be just around the corner.

The article and everyone's contributions have been insightful. However, it is important to give feedback. The feedback should begin with highlighting the strength(s) of the student's response. Afterwards, the teacher can now move further to call the student's attention on the areas of improvement based on the response given. It is important for the teacher to creatively handle this process. This would help sustain the student's attention and interest. Gamification is also a way to make online learning fun. This could be used as a starter, during the lessons and also to wrap up the lesson. However, it takes highly skilled teachers to get this right. Thank you.

Apart from gamification and feedback, there are other ways to keep track of your online students, one is to try connecting with all students in the session, take a response from one and call on another to comment or add, then students will be trying their best to listen to others and comment when needed; breakout rooms within online classes is an excellent way. It is to put each group of students in a breakout room to discuss a topic or try to brainstorm together and answer any of the questions being raised; the teacher here can keep track of this by joining each group, listening to what they are saying and adding on to them as well. Collaborative learning could be very successful within online classes especially when grouping students.