Gamification and e-learning

If you think playing computer games is not for you because you are not a little child anymore you should think twice. There is more in gaming than meets the eye.

Some don’t play because their life style or their work doesn’t leave time for that. This is perfectly understandable. Others don’t because they feel it’s just not serious to play. This is less understandable.

Whether you are a gamer or not, the gaming industry is a side of high tech you just cannot ignore. Between offline (home consoles mainly) and online games, the sector represented an average of $85 billion turnover for each of the past two years 2013 and 2014.

The diversity of the games you can play and the various age brackets that are concerned draw a large palette that is hard to describe or analyse in a few words or even a few paragraphs. It’s an entire world on its own.

However, one aspect of gaming concerns us all; it is the gamification of e-learning.

E-Learning is an exploding phenomenon that started 15 years ago. By the year 2020 it is estimated that half of learning in the world will be done online. The market will involve $105 billion this year alone.

It makes therefore perfect sense to use the attractive and motivating features of gaming in e-learning to boost productivity, to make it more pleasurable and to achieve better results. Combining gaming with e-learning is a winning formula that only presents advantages. Create courses that are shaped and designed like computer games is the ultimate digital form in the education field.

Keeping score, setting different levels of the game, creating avatars, competing with friends, being part of a story, feeling rewarded by the results and the scores, making it all lively, not forgetting the dynamism and the challenge that all games bring, it all creates a scope of ideal edutainment.

Big corporation are creating their own gamification for e-learning. It is in no way a simple task as it involves a huge dose of creativity, as well as great programming skills, teaching experience, and overall requires large, expensive teams to achieve good results. Look at the credits that roll with advanced gaming and you can easily compare them with the credits that come at the end of major motion pictures that cost tens of millions of dollars and make teams of hundreds work.

“… there is actually an exact science behind why gamification in eLearning is so successful… [It] improves knowledge absorption and retention.” (Christopher Pappas, Dec-2014). 

Given the cost of developing quality gamification for e-learning, for now only the wealthy actors of the private sector seem able to generate good products. In Jordan the activity is hardly emerging and a lot remains to be done. One can bet, however, that locally designed and developed games for e-learning are expected to appear on the market as early as this year.