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Introducing Gamified Learning in eduMe

Isidora Markovic
Isidora Markovic

At eduMe we talk a big game, and rightly so. Every week we bring more clients on board. We have proven use cases in every corner of the world and continue to learn from our partnerships with established players across a whole host of industries. We are proud to count the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Deloitte and Vodafone among them.

Delivering an outstanding product means constant innovation. We strive to go beyond the realm of dated, clunky ‘Learning Management Systems’ and offer a proposition that no one else does - a tool to make your workforce successful.

The goal of Workforce Success is to give people access to the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it, and a voice to be heard - so they are empowered to perform at their best.

We’ve tailored our solution around the issues that delivering knowledge to a modern, dispersed workforce entails. The first of these being that... 

Where we work is changing

Worldwide, there are 2.7 billion deskless workers.

These employees are often remote, without an office to go to. How can you keep them informed, engaged and though they are working as part of a team towards a greater goal?

Information is hard to retain

It takes less than a day for us to forget 40% of information we’ve engaged with. This is known as the ‘forgetting curve’. And unless repeated, the percentage of information retained will only continue to decrease in the following days. There is an easy way to combat this loss of knowledge - repetition.

If information gets repeated just a few times at regular intervals, the amount retained increases dramatically.  

If you aim to equip your workforce with the knowledge they need to succeed in a sustained, scalable way, it has to go beyond them completing lessons or courses you send them in one-off, isolated instances. They must engage with content regularly. 

Microlearning Graph-01-1

While looking into our users’ habits we noticed a trend in the top 10% of performers. (Hint: it was to do with repetition!). Top scorers would often complete the same lesson multiple times, strengthening their knowledge and improving their chances of success. 

How can you reward the users who show this behaviour and encourage others to start doing the same in one fell swoop?

Introducing Progress!

We have gamified our learning experience to make it more engaging. Your workforce now earn points for completing lessons. 

They can gain levels as they complete content and see where they rank in the company, inspiring a feeling of community. This is important for remote workers who are often dispersed and don’t get the opportunity to spend time with peers.

Our approach to gamification in the eduMe app had to be very considered. We already see very high figures for month to month engagement due in part to our streamlined microlearning format. We had to ensure Progress sat on top of our existing experience and didn't disrupt the users flow.

We've designed a new ‘Progress screen’ where your workforce can track their progress, see their level, rankings and total points.

Why Progress

Across the course of a day, we check our phones 58 times. Most people average 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phones daily. 20% spend more than 4.5 hours a day on them. 

Further to that, 65% of smartphone users have games on their phones. As a society, we are becoming increasingly smartphone oriented. 

The reason gamification is so powerful as a learning tool because it mirrors how people are spending their leisure time - on apps or games on their smartphones.

Even if people aren't explicitly playing a game, features like the ‘Like’ button in apps with widespread usage fire off the same circuits in our brain. Their association with rewards, positive reinforcement and dopamine release, is the same reason we enjoy playing games. Essentially - our technological experience is gamified and we've made a learning experience to suit this.

We call this making your 9-5 resemble your 5-9, in terms of the same seamless technological experience. This is a key facet of achieving Workforce Success.

How does Progress work?

Users will earn 10 points for completing lessons. Every time they complete a lesson.

For first time lesson completion, users get 10 bonus points. This is to make sure users feel incentivised to pick up new content.

Remember: it’s regular engagement with your content that will empower your workforce to perform at their very best, by equipping them with the tools they need to succeed. 

Consuming information once for compliance’s sake then leaving it to gather dust isn’t good enough.

Levels

Points accumulate, so once certain point thresholds have been met, users will level up.

We didn't want gamification to rely on admins providing real life rewards. Why? Tangible rewards have their value, but a good app (or game) doesn’t need a carrot at the end of a stick in the form of a real world reward.  If someone is already intrinsically motivated to do something because they enjoy it, then they don’t need incentives to participate.

In fact external incentives can REDUCE their level of motivation, because it puts the focus on the outcome instead of the activity.

With extrinsic motivation, we act specifically to earn a reward or avoid a punishment; with intrinsic motivation, the activity itself is rewarding.

If you think about your own app behaviour, most of us play mobile games on a daily basis with no tangible reward for doing so. 

In fact it’s so engaging that one of our clients, Honduras’ largest mobile operator Tigo, saw a 20% increase in lesson completions per month.

Every time a user levels up the app congratulates them and changes the look of their progress screen.  

The user will get a new illuminated level image and background colour. These may be small changes but they really help to motivate users and encourage regular usage.

Rankings - “where do I sit?”

Traditional leaderboards are dated - they often result in unfriendly, unhealthy competition and encourage employees to view themselves as lone wolves rather than part of a team working together. 

Conventional leaderboards show your workforce where they sit in the company but don't help them feel like they're a part of something bigger. 

No one wants to be at the bottom of the leaderboard and, although for some it may be a motivator, often it leads to users feeling a sense of disappointment which leads to disengagement. 

So we’ve adopted a different approach. We looked at the information a user really needs to know. Rankings shows users how many others in the company are on their level, how many are above their level and how many sit below.  

This answers ‘where do I sit?’ with the added benefit of a sense of belonging and shared purpose.

New animations

While building Progress we needed to replace our end of lesson animations. They needed to become:

  1. more dynamic and,

  2. they needed to award users points.

Our old animations either looked blurry or required lots of editing to get smooth.

We had a look at what others were doing and made a move over to Lottie, Airbnb's animation library. Look out for more high-quality animated assets coming in the near future.

What's next?

We talk a lot about empowering your workforce through the right communication, training and engagement. But something else intrinsic to Workforce Success is having a voice.

Your people can only be empowered to perform at their very best when they feel they have a voice with which to speak up with, and that this voice is being heard.

Our Workforce Success solution is in a continual state of improvement - evolving alongside a workforce in flux and their ever-changing needs. We work to enhance our offering every day and have exciting new features on the horizon that we’re excited to share with you.

So watch this space! 👀

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