It is unstoppable how recent times demand to develop students’ internal capacities and to change the academic paradigms. According to the experts, we are educating the new generations to live in a world that does not exist. In fact, one of the phrases most repeated inside the academic environment is that if one person of the past decade is teleported to our times, in the only place where no changes have taken place in what respects our decade would be found in classrooms and in the church. The rest of the areas have been transformed profoundly by the introduction of advanced technologies and in ICT. Sir Ken Robinson, expert in education, writer and British lecturer states, “Secondary contemporary learning centers still have parallelisms with assembly lines, division of labor and the mass production initiated by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford.” For this reason, training centers that seek to adapt and integrate these new technologies must use new methodologies and tools such as gamification to create new learning dynamics.
This traditional system is absolutely depleted and obsolete. The called Generation Z, according to the investigator Tim Elmore, he describes, “Learn with a series of new modalities called EPIC (experience, participation, image and connection).” This means that for young people, master classes are not helpful and that teaching methods need to be more interactive. We learn more when it comes accompanied by an emotion, discovery, challenge, adventure, etc.
This has led experts in training to comprehend the importance of game dynamics in learning and thus the importance of transferring gamification to an academic environment. But what is gamification?
Gamification is the use of game mechanics in learning environment and non-playful applications in order to boost motivation, concentration, effort, loyalty and other positive values common to all the games. It started as a commercial strategy in applications like Foursquare, where the most active users were rewarded with discounts and greater visibility in the page. Then, it was passed to the companies like a strategy to motivate their employees to participate in an innovation process and also to achieve a greater motivation and loyalty of their personnel.
The success of these sectors has led to start an investigation in the training sector and to prove the advantages of gamification for learning verifying the benefits and capacities of the game for the immense amount of knowledge acquisition.
“A student can dedicate a game up to 200 hours and most of us would like to undertake the same quantity of effort in their tasks,” remarks Alex Games, assistant professor at Michigan State University and Senior Program Manager for Learning and Organizational Motivation.
According to science, when we participate in activities that stimulate our body and mind, for example in sports, we release a hormone known as endorphin which is associated with pleasure. This same effect is reached in e-Learning through the introduction of games and challenges that defy the students or gives them the opportunity to receive a reward even if it is something so simple like passing to the next level. When you release endorphins, students do not only do they have fun during the online learning process but they retain a great quantity of information. Ultimately, through eLearning gamification we create an environment where you can learn by emotions, since our students feel that they are reaching their goal. This feeling contributes in turn to generate a greater motivation and loyalty by the student in achieving their tasks.
Hereafter, we will mention a series of advantages that contribute to the incorporation of gamification in the teaching-learning process, which we are sure, will motivate you to introduce them in your future training projects:
- Stimulates and makes more attractive for student participation.
- Material simplification or difficult subjects.
- Encourages constant participation.
- Creates a positive feedback through rewards.
- Promotes discipline, perseverance and triumph.
- Promotes companionship.
- Contributes to construct a personal identity.
- Transforms apparently tedious activities to fun and stimulant activities.
- Increase in communication.
- Generates an environment of trust.
In Computer Aided ELearning, from the beginning we bet for an investigation and the innovation inside the training environment, which is why we destine a great part of our investment in R&D. Fruit of this continued investigation process, this has led to the development of new technology solutions for eLearning training. We are considered a referent in the market in this sector due to our pioneer work in integrating gamification techniques and active learning. Dexway online language courses incorporate multimedia activities that maintain the students’ motivation throughout the course: Interactive vocabulary games, videos and audios of real-life situations, phonetic practice and pronunciation where voice recognition is measured by colors, expression labs, magazines, etc. That is to say, all of our courses are designed with a great number of proposed activities in a challenge mode where learning takes place in a fun and agile way.
Discover our Dexway courses and language-learning methods by clicking here.
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