Designing Competitions for Gamification

In learning, gamification is competition integrated into a learning system. The competition could be to gain leaderboard points, to gain a position in a team, to receive a badge of recognition or a social validation such as a ‘like’ or other expressions of praise from the learners community. The system can also extend to giving away monetary rewards such as redeemable points or coupons. The underlying idea is why not make learning fun and exciting with an associated reward system. This post covers some very important pointers that you must be aware of when designing a competition for gamification in a learning system.

Learning Analytics and Learner Activity

While data from a Learning Management System (LMS) can tell you about assessment scores and percentage completions, it can also tell you a lot about your learners, the content and their interplay. To get performance insights of your platform and the learning content, you must identify different data points, fetch the data, analyze and interpret it. Learner proficiency, Learner engagement, Learner preferences and Learner progress are some metrics that are computed by combining several data. Some examples of data that you collect from a learning platform are Clicks, Pages visited, Time spent, Search keywords, etc. There are some metrics that are directly connected to learner activity and we will look at those in this post.