How to gamify your online teaching experience?

Gamification is one of the most powerful ways to improve your user experience for your online teaching platform. By incorporating game-like elements, you can captivate your students, boost engagement, and drive better learning outcomes. Whether you’re building an online platform, a product or even giving an online service, it’s important to

Why?

Because who doesn’t love it?

Our brains are wired in such a way that we tend to enjoy an experience curated with game-like elements.

gamify the user’s experience.

In this post, we’ll explore the concept of gamification, why it matters for online educators and practical strategies you can use to gamify your teaching experience.

What is gamification and why should you care?

Gamification means adding a game-like mechanism into a product, or service to make the experience very unique.

A lot of businesses try to gamify their platform so that more users stick to their platform, spend more time, and eventually buy from the platform. At its core, gamification taps into our innate human desires for achievement, progression, social connection, and recognition, so it can directly help online educators like yourself have higher course completion rate and platform retention.

Gamification can also cultivate a stronger sense of community and belonging among your students, further enhancing the overall learning experience. Ultimately, it empowers you to create an online teaching environment that captivates your audience and fuels their passion for the material.

But the real question is, if you’re a technical educator selling courses online, how can you gamify your platform experience?

Let’s understand

What gamification techniques can be added to your online course?

Once you understand the comprehensive benefits of gamification, the next step is to explore the specific techniques you can implement to enhance your online teaching experience.

There are a bunch of game-inspired mechanics and elements that can be seamlessly integrated into your course to improve your platform’s user experience.

Let’s understand each, one-by-one:

Implement point systems for progress, achievements, and status:

Establish clear milestones and goals for your students to work towards, and reward their progress and accomplishments with points, badges, or level advancements. Some may also call it “Experience Points” popularly known as “XP”.

These visual markers of achievement not only provide a sense of progression but also instill a healthy competitive spirit as students strive to climb the ladder.

You can gamify and associate XP points with badges, statuses, levels, or even ranks. Platforms like Codewars, Leetcode, and Hackerrank do it really well.

Here’s an example of how a point system can look like:

P.S. I’m a big fan of Duolingo and I love how they have gamified the platform. Notice the concept of “streaks” as well.

Use leaderboards and competition to foster friendly rivalries:

Leaderboards allow students to track their performance relative to their peers, tapping into our innate desire to excel and be recognized. Friendly competition can motivate students to put in extra effort, all while maintaining a collaborative, supportive learning environment.

Leaderboards also work really well if you’re organising a weekly or a monthly contest.

By the way, a lot of creators using fermion.app, have integrated leaderboards inside their learning platform to boost student’s experience. If you would also like to integrate such a leaderboard, schedule a free demo call with us here.

Here’s an example of a leaderboard provided by fermion.app:

Incorporate storytelling to create immersive learning experiences:

Rather than presenting content in a linear, dry fashion, weave engaging narratives and storylines into your course. This narrative-driven approach transforms the learning experience into an exciting journey, making complex topics more memorable and relatable for your students.

Fermion lets you achieve this experience by adding more engaging elements to your course rather than just adding video items. This means you can choose from a variety of items like articles, videos, ebooks, quizzes, exams or contests, coding labs, etc., and make your learning experience immensely enriching.

Above is an example of how your Fermion dashboard will look like, from where you can create engaging items in your syllabus.

Leverage feedback loops through immediate rewards:

Provide students with quick, positive reinforcement whenever they achieve a goal or demonstrate mastery of a concept. This iterative feedback loop satisfies the human craving for validation and encourages continued engagement and learning.

To give you a quick idea: you can also integrate tally-like forms inside Fermion which helps you collect feedback from your users at any point in their learning journey on your platform.

Encourage social interaction, collaboration, and peer-to-peer learning through Communities:

Gamification techniques like discussion forums, group projects, and peer review mechanisms foster a sense of community and social connection among your students. By learning from and supporting one another, students become active participants in the learning process.

You can always set up a WhatsApp group, discord community, or a telegram channel as your primary community but all of these tools don’t offer you a white-labeled integration with your platform. If you’re wondering how can you set up your own private community, you’ve come to the right place – Fermion offers you a private slack-like community that can be integrated right inside your online platform.

You can read this short blog to learn more about communities on Fermion: https://fermion.app/blog/how-to-host-your-private-slack-community-under-your-platform

P.S. This is how a community (using Fermion) looks like:

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Conclusion

By now, it’s clear that gamification is a powerful tool for online educators looking to elevate their teaching experience.

From boosting student engagement and motivation to fostering a stronger sense of community, the strategic incorporation of game-like elements can truly transform the way your students learn and interact with your course content.

Start small, analyze the results, and continue iterating to find the right balance that works for your unique audience and learning objectives. With the right approach, you can unlock a new level of learning magic that leaves your students hungry to come back for more.

Are you creating an online technical course?

If you’re an online course creator, I’m sure you would have come across the myriad number of challenges there are to tackle.

We at Fermion, help creators kickstart their online technical academy with the right set of tooling. So if you’re looking to create premium bootcamps, conduct live classes, host powerful coding labs, and monitor strong analytics, Fermion is the right place for you.

Feel free to schedule a free demo and get a complete walkthrough of the platform here.