Gamification is a rising trend, it means the use of game design elements and digital game design techniques to non game related areas such as business or learning. Learning Management Systems such as Lessonly are using Gamification to interact with your audience and to be able to collaborate productively.
Gamification, like any other strategy, comes with its own share of advantages and disadvantages.
Pros of the gamification techniques can be listed as below–
Engagement–
Gamification makes learning fun and engaging, which means better participation from the employees training. By making learning fun, trainees can participate wholeheartedly.
Motivation-
Gamification of learning entails better motivation from participants to do better. Higher motivation translates to better zeal of trainees and interest to learn something new.
Challenge–
The strategy of gamification challenges the participants to perform to the best of their abilities.Participants can be challenged to do better in different areas of interest. Thus, ensuring maximized potential.
Instant Feedback–
Gamification of learning ensures instant feedback in all scenarios. This makes learning easier by giving them the right solution if they are not able to find it themselves.And with the help of instant feedback, it becomes easier to find the domains that need more work.
Learning at individual pace–
Every individual has a different learning speed. Online training that includes gaming strategies allow learning at the pace suitable for the learner. By this, trainees can grasp the available knowledge according to their comfort level.
Social interaction–
While playing the intended games the trainees interact with the trainer as well as other trainees, which increases the social interaction as well.
Cons of the gamification technique can be –
Cost-
The gamification of learning includes incurrence of additional cost as it is not cheap to gamify learning scenarios. This includes buying the game and also ensuring the system specification suits the game in question for it to run.
Frustration–
Experts say that employment of gamification techniques to learning leads to decrease of learner’s attention span. And when they dont get instant gratification in real life, it can lead to frustration.
Assessment challenges–
There is a gap between the course material and the games available in the market.It becomes the responsibility of the trainer to first find the right game and then find a way to translate the results of game progress to fulfilling objectives.
Orchestration challenges–
Setting up a game in a training scenario requires a lot of prior planning and analyzing. Even after it is set, many questions that loom over the head of a trainer are, if the specification of the trainee’s system supports the game, is additional cost required for students to play the game outside the class, and many such others.
Competition –
Introduction of gaming in training scenarios propagates competitiveness. While, being competitive is good for gaming scenarios, at the end of the day, organisation requires its employees to be cooperative.
Application lag by learners–
With the gamification techniques, learning can become engaging and fun, but at the same time, getting good results in training exercises does not guarantee good learning. There can be an application lag by the trainees that does not necessarily translate to correct application of learning in real world scenarios.
Despite the mentioned cons, Gamification has a growing market, as the pros are significantly more important.The Gamification market in 2020 stood at 10.19 million US Dollars, which is expected to reach a whopping 38.42 million US Dollars at a CAGR of 25.10% for the period. This shows the increasing popularity of Gaming in different arenas.
