How Gamification Can Be Deployed On Our Academy LMS

As a company, Growth Engineering are well known for our love of gamification. A lot of people ask me how exactly our customers deploy a gamification strategy, whether they're using our Academy LMS, the Genie authoring tool or our new Knowledge Arcade microlearning platform. In this blog I’m going to answer some of the big questions about gamification.

First, using gamification across the platform doesn’t mean we turn the entire system into a game. It doesn’t mean that we’ve had to sacrifice core functionality to make space for game mechanics, either. We’ve simply incorporated gamification into all areas of the LMS to make it more engaging and fun for the users. In our experience, our most successful customers are those who use these game mechanics to the fullest potential. Clearly, the more the learners love the platform, the less time it takes to see the results, and the greater the ultimate ROI.

What’s really important when developing a gamified strategy is to make sure you use the platform in a way that resonates with your brand and company vision and values. The gaming mechanics need to be applied uniquely according to each and every company culture. This takes strategy and planning, which isn’t easy to accomplish alone. That’s why we include gamification workshops as part of each and every customer we set up. In these intensive gamification crash-courses, we take platform admins through the key principles and help them create a winning rollout strategy. There are 4 major mechanics on the platform:

1. Epic Meaning

The first and most important is the overall Epic Meaning of the platform. This connects the mission and the values of the organisation to something the learners can believe in. By eliciting an emotional response from the start, you have a better chance at getting your learners hooked.

In addition is needs to convey a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) - a sense of purpose and mission that that the learning community can get behind and drive towards. For Growth Engineering, our mission ‘to wage war on dull online learning’ couldn’t be much bigger, hairier or more audacious! it’s about finding your passion, ‘Unleashing your inner superhero’ and driving towards being the best you can.

2. Narrative

The second thing you need is a narrative that brings the Epic Meaning to life. You need a story that gives your learners a sense of progression, and gaming mechanics like levels and learning quests are perfect for achieving this. 

Learners need to feel like they’re moving toward something in order to stay engaged in the journey. Well thought-out levels let you break that journey into regular intervals, or mini-goals that the learners can aim for. This also helps admins clarify training for different roles and development paths. Ongoing levels also let the admins “scaffold” the learning with regular learning challenges that become increasing difficult to achieve.

We’ve created an overarching narrative in our own admin training platform, Academy Superheroes. When new admins want to learn how to use the Academy LMS for maximum engagement, they can log on to Academy Superheroes and become a hero on an epic quest! The level structure places each admin as a superhero learning new skills as they wage war on Doctor Dull and his army of zombie learners!

3. Badges & XP

The third element is virtual rewards like Badges and XP. Badges and XP are important, as they give immediate feedback to the learner on a job well done and they help support the narrative. We apply badges and XP in several ways, letting our admins do a few different things:

• Achievement badges - When we are learning something new, or we are trying something for the first time we need reward and encouragement to stay engaged. We need lots of praise at the beginning and less as we grow in confidence - but we still need it!

This is where the achievement badges come in. The Academy LMS includes inbuilt triggers that praise, reward and encourage learners for simply using the platform. They can earn the Vanity badge for changing their profile photo, or the Sherlock Holmes badge for using the search function. These rewards help them learn how the LMS works and lets them have fun while doing it.

When a learner first comes into the platform they get loads of these fun achievements. Once they know their way around, it gets gradually more difficult to earn later achievements. They might need to log in 100 times to earn a ‘Gold Login Achievement’, or post 50 comments to get the ‘Social Butterfly Achievement’. This helps admins sustain the engagement for veterans as well as new starters.

• Reward Badges - Unlike Achievement badges, which are automatically awarded for engaging with the platform, Reward Badges are defined by the admin. These badges can easily be created in the back end of the LMS and allocated to learning objects. They can award badges for attending a classroom event, completing an assessment, watching a video, and any other learning activity you can imagine!
• Certificate Badges - In the world of Badges, these golden learning nuggets are the Mack Daddy! They’re super-rare, difficult to earn and the envy of all your learners! Admins create these Certificate Badges and allocate them to entire curricula. Because they’re special badges that require that extra effort, they need to be used sparingly. More importantly, they need to look big and swanky and deserving of all the hard work that the learner will have to do to get them! 
• Praise Badges - Here is where we can get the managers and supervisors involved. These are badges that only team leaders can give out. Like all badges on the Academy LMS, admins are free to design them, ensuring they reinforce the Epic Meaning of the platform. They are special because they let lines managers and team leaders easily praise their team. You can create them for learning-related endeavours, but your imagination is your only barrier when it comes to Praise Badges. Your managers could award Praise Badges for achieving sales targets, displaying great teamwork or coming up with a great idea. This makes the job of praising easy for managers and gives administrators another source of consistent reporting.
• Mission, Vision and Values Badges - There is no point having Epic meaning and an audacious goal if there are no badges to support it! Mission, Vision and Values Badges (Let’s call them Values Badges) are super-special because they add another dimension when it comes to evaluating engagement. Anyone on the platform can give a Values Badge to anyone else, which gets the community thinking about how they are moving towards and delivering the greater goals of the organization.

The really cool thing about Values Badges is that you can use them as part of your performance management activities. You can set a target number of Values Badges in a year for everyone in the business. This will make sure they play their part in the bigger picture and keeps everyone driving towards the same ultimate goal.

• XP - Experience Points are the essential currency of any game. Ever since Space Invaders, game developers have seen how points and high-scores keep gamers returning. On the Academy LMS, you can allocate XP to any content. This lets you communicate the relative importance of every item in the learning programme and highlight those with more value.
• XP Coins - The great thing about Experience Points is that they can be exchanged for XP Coins! With our Reward Centre, every learner can exchange the points they’ve earned in their learning journey for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Admins can create any reward, from shopping vouchers to parking privileges. Learners can then access the Reward Centre and redeem their hard-earned XP - so points really do mean prizes!

4. Leaderboards

The fourth element is the Leaderboard. Leaderboards need to be used carefully. In our opinion, they’re a great motivational tool for most people, but if you're always at the bottom of a Leaderboard it's not much fun. That's why administrators need to ensure that everyone can climb a leaderboard and get to the top of the tree. Leaderboards play a huge role on our Academy LMS and again we don’t just have one type of Leaderboard - we have 6!

• Mothership Leaderboard - this is the culmination of all badges and/or XP earned by anyone since the platform’s launch. It's broken down by reporting hierarchy, meaning that you only see the learners you are responsible for. So, if you're the CEO, you can see all divisions and all colleagues, but if you lead a telesales division in Plymouth you will only see the team that’s relevant to you. Similarly, if you have a multi-tenancy platform, you will only see the users in your company.
• Movers and Shakers Leaderboard - This is the leaderboard that shows who has moved up the leaderboard in your division the most. Without this feature, it’s easy for the same few faces to dominate the Leaderboard for all time. This summary of recent activity gives every eager learner their chance to share the spotlight!
• Your Ranking - This is your individual leaderboard that shows your place in the global leaderboard. Sometimes the top of the leaderboard is more of a long-term goal, and you need something more achievable to aim for. This segment highlights your position, showing you who is directly behind and directly ahead of you.
• Quests leaderboards - We developed Learning Quests as a solution for creating bite-sized learning campaigns. These microlearning units can contain a variety of media including tests, videos, audio, images and scenarios. Each Quest has its own leaderboard making it a great way of getting departments to face-off against each other in a race to complete the learning as fast as possible with the best scores.
• Battles Leaderboards - Battles are another form of microlearning content that pits individual learners against each other in quiz-based combat! Each battle is played around specific topic or area. The question pools are created by admins, who then invite learners to battle each other. Using the specific Battles Leaderboards, it’s easy to see who has dominance over the subject area. Aside from boosting engagement, this is a great way to identify subject matter experts in your business!
• Campaign Leaderboards - Campaigns seek to translate learning and knowledge into behaviour by encouraging the learners to think about the topic in new ways. They are social in nature and they’re all about how the learning is being applied and embedded across the organisation. Admins can ask a question and the community can respond using text, image or video. For example, in a retail environment, the admin could ask the learners to take a picture of good product placement. The community then rates the responses with thumbs up or thumbs down. It’s this community rating that drives the leaderboards.

As you can see, a gamified LMS lets you do a lot to improve learner engagement, but this has positive knock-on effects in other areas. You can improve your reporting, capture intellectual capital and identify your knowledge ambassadors - and even have fun while you’re doing it! The trick is to make sure your gamification elements work harmoniously together and reinforce the key messages at the heart of your organisation. By doing this, you can maximise the engagement impact and get a better return on your training investment!