While gamification has always been used in learning in some form or the other, rapid digitization in the last few years has given the concept a new meaning altogether. Today technology is being used extensively to create unique ways of leveraging game-based learning and achieving better learning outcomes.
This is especially true in higher education and hybrid learning environments, where gamification can be instrumental in helping increase learner engagement and can offer a number of other advantages.
This post aims to explore more about gamification in higher education and its benefits for higher ed learners.
What is Gamification?
Gamification refers to the technique of applying gaming strategies and various game elements to make learning more engaging for learners.
These game-based techniques in higher education aim to motivate and incentivize learners, which significantly improves the quality of self-paced learning.
The best part about gamification in higher education is that it can be applied easily to digital learning environments to enhance students’ interest and help them better understand the course material.
Benefits of Gamification in Higher Education
Among the other key benefits of gamification in higher education are the following:
1. Enhances the Level of Engagement
Higher student engagement is one of the main advantages of applying gamification techniques in higher education. Studies have also shown that higher education students are much more likely to spend time playing a learning-based game if there is a reward or point system attached to it.
Game-based learning modules further promote student engagement by creating a variety of challenges for learners using leaderboards, badges, rewards, etc., and tracking their progress as they learn.
When learners feel positive about the overall learning process and know they will be rewarded for their efforts, they become active participants in their own learning.
2. Makes Learning Exciting and Interactive
In higher education specifically, gamification of learning helps you create fun, educational, and entertaining course content. The concept works on the basic human drive to compete, improve, and outperform peers, which helps drive engagement.
Apart from this, gamification also makes learning much more informative and exciting because of the various elements of interactivity in it. This helps create the feeling of immersion, which gives learners the opportunity to become more participative in the overall learning process.
Various role-play and competitive elements, such as leaderboards and reward systems add an exciting, immersive angle, which, if managed well, can improve learning outcomes significantly.
3. Increase in Knowledge Retention
With as much as 80% of learners being more effective with gamified practices, the application of gamification principles in higher education also helps in reinforcing the learned knowledge and aids in better retention of the concepts.
One of the reasons behind this is visually appealing graphics, the engaging nature of the content, and the ability of gamification to actively involve learners.
3. Personalized Learning Environments
Gamified learning experiences in higher education offer learners various options regarding their presence, task, level, rewards, and speed of task or challenge completion.
The main benefit of gamification here is its potential to personalize and tailor learning to suit the specific needs of each learner. Further, giving students a choice in their learning increase their sense of autonomy and improves learner engagement.
4. Better Feedback Mechanism
Applying gamification techniques in higher education allow teachers and educators to provide unique ways of giving feedback to learners. This kind of constructive feedback not only helps in understanding learners’ performance curves but also helps in identifying the knowledge gaps.
Further, gamification creates a proper framework for microlearning by simplifying the course content into small bite-sized nuggets, which is an easy way of learning large portions of content. This kind of gamification design technique can intrigue learners to pick up small information bites, thus keeping them motivated to learn more.
5. Student Motivation
Yet another benefit of gamification in higher education is increased student motivation. Applying game-based techniques in higher education makes learners highly motivated to score well and remain at the top of the leaderboard chart.
While some learners are already motivated to compete with their peers, some make use of rewards charts and leaderboards as a guide to know what score to aim for in the given activity and remain motivated throughout the learning process.
Ways to Apply Gamification to Your Content
In this section, we will discuss some of the most effective gamification techniques that can be applied in higher education.
- Badges and Trophies
Build a badge system that you can use to scaffold the learning experience. This should need specific knowledge and competencies before moving on to more complex tasks/challenges. You can also use these badges to help students track their own progress.
- Role-Play
Role-play in this context means using various elements of the game for role-playing, thus giving learners the autonomy to pick which tasks to complete, acknowledging their achievements publicly, as well as making use of a peer-to-peer voting system.
- Experience Points
Another gamification strategy that you can employ is experience points, where learners are required to gain points to go to the next level and win the task. Using the same concept, you can also use a grading system where learners get the next grade using experience points.
To Conclude
The gamification of learning in higher education is an approach that seeks to better engage and motivate students by using various game designs and elements in learning environments.
In this post, we have covered how gamified learning for higher-ed students has the potential to enhance both learners’ engagement and the overall quality of learning.
If you are looking for powerful gamified learning solutions for your higher-ed institute, Hurix is a well-known name to partner with.
At Hurix, we make use of thoughtfully designed gamified learning solutions to create a powerful learning environment where students can better connect with the course modules. Further, we ensure to design gamified learning solutions that are completely tailored to your unique educational objectives.
Get in touch to learn more.