Gamification: Using Game Mechanics to Enhance eLearning

As mentioned in the article it is very important to occupy the attention of the student or in short get them engage when using e-learning. We need to develop their wants and liking for successful e-learning and this can be done only by rewarding learners.

I have used some of the ideas in my eLearning project for occupying student’s attention that are presented in the article. It is very important to have clear goals and objective and to have rewards that are associated with these goals. If objectives are clear to students from the beginning then it is easy to grab their attention. For this purpose I always explain in advance what are the objectives, outcome and rewards associated with the particular task to students.

In my project before using the eLearning material I gave students an online pre-test which highlight current knowledge of the students. There are some (reward) marks associated for attempting this test, which encourage all students to attempt this pre- test. After doing the test want will develop among the students to learn the words and definitions that they were not able to understand during the test.  They are then provided with eLearning material which helps them to learn things which were unclear to them earlier. Students have already idea about the types of questions from the pre-test which help them to focus on the material. Once they finish the material all students have to do a post-test. This posttest shows their improvement and learning from the eLearning material. Students can see a big difference between the pre-test and posttest marks. The posttest (reward) marks are recorded in the overall grades. This technique used in my project is similar to the “Linear flow of Goal” model mentioned in the article.

With help of posttest and pretest it becomes easier to measure the progress of students and helps in providing them feedback that how they can further improve. In some cases students feedback also help to improve or simplify the e-learning material. Using e-learning and rewarding motivate students to get involved in the task as they can see their peers are learning knowledge while getting rewarded.