Gamification is the use of game design and mechanics to enhance non-game contexts by increasing participation, engagement, loyalty and competition. These methods can include points, leader boards, direct competitions and stickers or badges, and can be found in industries including education. We’ve seen gamification already in a variety of settings: completing a punch card to win a free sandwich, receiving a badge for being the first of friends to check in at a particular restaurant, or expanding our profiles on LinkedIn to bring the “completion bar” up to 100%. Gamification has even worked its way into many industries including education. Games, in any form, increase motivation through engagement. Nowhere else is this more important than education. Nothing demonstrates a general lack of student motivation quite like the striking high school dropout rates: approximately 1.2 million students fail to graduate each year (All4Ed, 2010). It’s been proven that gamifying other services has resulted in retention and incentive. So, gamification is a new trend in education and it is believed that it can contribute to better results well. Gamification can be used in course grading: One success story is Lee Sheldon, a professor at Indiana University, who gamified his course by abandoning grades and implementing an “experience points” system. Students’ letter grades are determined by the amount of points they have accumulated at the end of the course, in other words, by how much they have accomplished.

Another way of gamifying learning is by awarding learners with badges: For each assignment completed the system cab award students with badges. This may seem like a regression back to Kindergarten stickers of gold stars, but it’s working for Khan Academy. As students watch instructional videos and complete problem sets, Khan Academy awards them with points and badges to track progress and encourage perseverance.

Another way to gamify online courses is by Integrating educational video games into your curriculum: The use of games allows students to fail, overcome, and persevere. Students are given a sense of agency—in games, they control the choices they make, and the more agency students have, the better students do. Instantaneous feedback and small rewards (or big ones, like winning) are external motivators that work .

Another way to gamify online learning is by promoting a little competition among learners: Top Hat is adopting game mechanics by including a “tournament” module in our platform. Trainers have found that the tournaments incentivize students to learn the material and practice. After all, everyone wants to see his or her name on the leaderboard? There are many gamifications techniques which are supported by various plugins for LMS and CMS platforms. They are easy to use and understand making the learning process fun and motivating.