eLearning can make professional development efficient and readily available, but the program’s strengths can also become its greatest weaknesses. Allowing workers to learn at their own pace can lead to a procrastination loop, and letting students tailor an independent plan of study risks isolate them from the support of study groups.
But gamification can help keep your workforce engaged in eLearning. A gamified platform like Bunchball Nitro can build motivation, ensure accountability, and encourage teamwork, making make your professional development program more effective.
Getting Past the “Clickthrough” Mentality
Like any education, what your workers get out of an eLearning course will really depend on how much effort they put in. But unlike traditional classroom lectures, most e-learning modules can be clicked through at warp speed. If the student’s sole motivation is to pass the quiz at the end, they’ll have little incentive to absorb anything beyond the bare minimum.
Gamification can help employees engage more fully with the material. Passing the final quiz is good, but when students are competing to be the head of the class, they’ll be motivated to fully master the course materials. A little healthy competition can help break the clickthrough mentality.
The Nitro platform can also create incentives beyond simple exam scores, promoting a more authentic style of learning. The platform can connect coworkers into a study group and make its members accountable for one another’s performance by rewarding the highest performing teams. Even those workers who are satisfied with doing the bare minimum for themselves will feel an obligation to help the team achieve a higher ranking.
Smarter Every Day
Flexibility is often touted as an advantage of eLearning. Students can complete the course on their own schedule, making it easier to fit in with their other responsibilities. But this flexibility can also lead to an unhealthy cycle of procrastination and cramming: putting a deadline on coursework is a surefire way to have students waiting until the last minute to complete the module. But if the course’s knowledge is to be retained, its lessons need to be repeatedly reinforced. That takes time and sustained effort.
The Nitro platform can provide a couple key tools that will help workers pace their eLearning progress and stay consistently engaged. By charting the whole office’s progress in real time, Nitro can allow individual workers to see when they’re falling behind. No one wants to be at the back of the pack, so when a worker sees that many of her colleagues have already passed the quiz and are moving on to the next module, she’ll be intrinsically motivated to catch up.
Gamification also allows you to break large courses into incremental steps. The final exam may determine who passes, but Nitro can reward students at every stage of the course. You can give out points for completing individual lessons or award badges to the first students who turn in an exercise, giving special recognition to your most committed students.
The Student Becomes the Teacher
Medical students have long used the “watch one, do one, teach one” method to learn common hospital procedures. For example, a student may watch as a more practiced classmate demonstrates how to palpate a patient’s abdomen; then the student will practice the procedure several times under supervision. Next week, the student will become the instructor, teaching a new classmate how to perform the procedure.
The rapid progression from student to instructor helps cement knowledge, and the experience of critiquing a classmate can bring about a new level of introspection. Gamification will help you create new opportunities for peer-learning. The platform’s deeper insights into eLearning performance will allow you to pair students according to their strengths and weaknesses on multiple axes.
The Nitro platform can give you the information necessary to build multidisciplinary study groups whose members possess a variety of backgrounds and learning styles. Mixing strong test-takers with the office’s most active discussion-board participants can yield surprising synergies and create opportunities for students to reinforce their knowledge by sharing with one another.
Building on Strengths
Bunchball Nitro can supercharge your eLearning program’s strengths. It capitalizes on the workforce’s natural tendencies, drawing on their competitive nature while also encouraging teamwork. The platform’s insights can help fine-tune your eLearning program and build collaborative engagement without sacrificing flexibility.
