Five Ideas For DL Course Gamification (Contact TELC for more)

Gamification is more than a passing trend, in recent years it has become a must-have feature for any successful LMS

Here are five ideas on how gamification can be integrated.

Increase course completion, knowledge transfer, and student motivation with this gamification plugin for Moodle.

Additional features (see screenshots):

  • Group learners into teams and have them compete for the leaderboards.
  • Award points to specific actions and course behaviors for a more personalised learning experience.
  • Award points to learners for activities that take place outside of Moodle (e.g. you took your students to a workshop and liked their work there so you give them points in Moodle/LevelUp XP.

Badges are a good way of celebrating achievement and showing progress. Badges may be awarded based on a variety of chosen criteria and may be displayed on a user's profile. Depending on implementation these badges can be given for them to display elsewhere too, such as by using the Badgr platform.

There are two categories of badges:

  • Site badges - available to users site-wide and related to the site wide activities, like finishing a set of courses.
  • Course badges - available to users enrolled in the course and related to the activities that happen inside the course.

The badges in Moodle have some important parts to be noted:

  • Name and details.
  • Expiry (if any).
  • Criteria such as: manually issued by someone, course completion, activity completion, previously awarded badges, competencies.
  • Ability to revoke a badge.
  • Criteria for site-level badges such as: completing a set of courses, completing a profile, cohort membership, previously awarded badges.
  • Once a badge is set up, it is not active until set to be earnable.

Some screenshots to give you an idea:

The Kahoot! EDU technology gives an organisation the following gamification abilities:

  • Puzzle: In a puzzle question, students need to order answers in the correct order. Perfect for spelling and grammar learning, building formulas and math equations, and more.
  • Image reveal: Gradually reveal the image in a kahoot question to get students focused.
  • Game experience: Color kingdom: Play team vs. team and work together to spread your kingdom's color across the land by answering questions correctly.
  • Game experience: Treasure trove: Answer questions correctly to earn points by collecting gems in player vs. player, arcade-style gameplay. Watch out for tricks!
  • Game experience: Submarine squad: Work together in cooperative gameplay that awards each correct answer with more fuel to get all players to safety!
  • Personalised learning: Based on spacing and testing learning methods, the Kahoot! app will create personalized kahoots with questions a student answered incorrectly in a live kahoot.

See images for some visual aids

Padlet digitizes the notice board for a rich media space that makes education communications better.

You can create a single or multiple walls that are able to house all the posts you want to share. From videos and images to documents and audio, it is literally a blank slate. It's collaborative, too, allowing you to involve students, other teachers, and even parents and guardians.

In the case of gamification and Padlet, it is possible to use number of likes per post, to say something like "First place gets a prize, which is X. Second place gets Y. Third place get Z"

As such, you're creating a leader-board based scenario.

Finally, it is possible to enable post/reply ratings within Moodle, and use those ratings to effectively create a leaderboard-based scenario of gamified learning, based on a discussion and students' ratings of said discussion and the replies made within.

Please don't hesitate to contact TELC if you're interested in training on the mentioned tools!

You may also read this article as a supplement: How Gamification May Help Transform Your LMS