When you think of gamification, what comes to mind? Is it a promising and fun way to motivate learners to engage with your content? Or, do you think of points, badges, and leaderboards that are often misapplied and ineffective… a fad that is quickly fading? Regardless of your experience with gamification as a strategy to motivate learner behavior, there are other benefits of gamification tools that aren’t as widely known. Digital badges, in particular, can provide you with powerful data that can help inform your learning strategy and improve your program performance.
If you caught my session at the CEdMA conference last fall, you know that I define gamification as applying game-like elements to non-game contexts – such as learning – using game-design thinking. It begins with understanding the motivation of your learners, and then using game-like mechanics to encourage specific behaviors. Common game mechanics include (but aren’t limited to) points, badges, and leaderboards, each of which--when used effectively--can motivate learners to engage and learn.
In this article, I want to explore an alternative use of gamification. Consider this question: What might digital badges provide training professionals even if these badges were “hidden,” and not actually earned by learners? The answer is probably evident by the title of this article: digital badges can provide data on your learner’s behavior, and this data can be used to understand the impact of your training program.
Badging is a form of gamification in which digital badges are earned by users for completing an action or behavior or a series of actions and behaviors. The data that is generated by badging opens windows into the effectiveness of training. You can tell a lot about how your learners are performing at a glance by paying attention to the badges they earn.
Digital badges provide a visual and often shareable signal to the learner and to others - an indication of an accomplishment. There is high potential for a digital badging strategy to drive learner behavior; however, the extent to which badges are effective in motivating and changing behavior depends entirely on the strategy in which they are implemented. A strategy leveraging game-design thinking can motivate learners to consume your content, which should be a primary goal of your training program.
A well-designed and well-executed digital badging program yields data that represents deep insights into improving your overall learning strategy by shining a light on learner behavior. We can easily see how many people have mastered certain workflows by the badges that they have earned, and that gives us the ability to significantly improve.
Here are some ways a badging strategy, and the resulting data, can be used to inform your learning strategy:
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