Yes, gamification is BIG right now in the eLearning and training industries. Yes, it’s effective in engaging participants. Yes, everyone is doing it. However, this shouldn’t be the only reason to incorporate gamification into your HR programs. In order to gamify eLearning courses successfully take these points into consideration before slapping on a point system and calling it a day:

A good eLearning course is like a lip-smacking, mouth-watering, finger-licking meat pie. Every cook has a different recipe, but the essential ingredients are the same—a juicy, meaty filling; spicy seasonings; and two flaky crusts. There are no cookie-cutter ways to create memorable and effective eLearning courses; the needs vary across industries. But the essentials are the same. Time to go over these eLearning must haves:

Are workers dropping out your eLearning courses like the proverbial ‘hot potato?’ Are they finding them hard to finish? Giving them bad reviews? Telling everyone they know a crazed monkey designed them? If so, it’s likely your courses have one or more of the following issues that have driven your learners away:

One of the biggest challenges that any operation deals with is new hire training. Your company likely has a specific way it wants things to be done, and there are often a lot of processes in place too. If you’re dealing with people who’ve been in your organization for a long time, it can be easy to forget how many functions of your business you don’t think about on a daily basis. With a new hire in place, however, you’ll likely be facing some questions about what to do and why it’s done that way. One solution that’s growing in popularity is microlearning.

“Are you feeling me?” Well, are you? Or, more importantly, is your audience feeling you? Understanding you? Connecting to what you’re putting out there? To get a resounding “yes!” to these questions you need to concern yourself with resonance which is, among other things, “a quality that makes something personally meaningful or important to someone.” Or in the words of Tony Schwartz in his book The Responsive Chord "Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communication evoke meaning in a listener or viewer." But why is resonance so necessary to eLearning course design? Another definition for this concept has to do with sound and “the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a nearby object.” In simple words; this means one vibration causes another vibration or a ripple effect. For your audience, if you pluck just the right heartstring for them, their learning process gets easier because one piece of information will set off reminders of other knowledge, making it simpler to connect them all together, so they don’t feel like so many individual things to remember. And when things are easier they are more likely to continue with your course and retain information. Your lesson will resonate when your audience feels it, understands it and becomes mentally/emotionally invested in it. As an eLearning designer, you need to be in sync with your students, to harmonize with them, their goals and their experiences. This is the only way to fight your way through the content crush, or oversaturation of content and information that your audience is subjected to each day. To do this your eLearning course content should have these attributes:

We’ve come a long way in the ways of corporate training and learning. The history of corporate training and development dates back to 1872 where Hoe and Company established factory schools to help train machinists during the Industrial Revolution. By 1917, corporate training had expanded into “Show, Tell, Do and Check” method from Charles R. Allen where he would walk his shipyard workers through complex processes. By the 1950’s and 1960’s, computers help introduce virtual reality and technology-assisted instruction. As the world becomes more innovative, so are the ways we learn in school, at our jobs, and in life. Gone are the days where onboarding and corporate training is a one size fits all video for employees to learn and engage in. Today, corporate training programs have the choice, from microlearning to custom eLearning development, on how to best train their incoming workforce. As such, these training programs will most likely incorporate current digital trends to not only help engage top talent but help them grow within their career and stay with the company longer. Below are four digital trends that are impacting corporate training and learning, and why organizations should consider incorporating them.

Product designer William Newton wrote a compelling article some time ago on the tiers of good design and the pyramid they form. But this idea can be applied to more than physical product design; it can be used to create better eLearning courses, as well. Find the original article here: The Design Process: A Pyramid Using this same structure, we explore just how the pyramid can help you improve your eLearning design workflow.

If you assume students are only learning from eLearning courses, you are failing to leverage a huge part of the learning process. Ask yourself where do you learn? Most of us might answer “in a classroom”, but, in reality, the majority of learning comes from other places, like Personal Learning Networks. And these networks are personal, meaning there are no two PLNs that are equal; each of us has a unique range of people we learn from including peers, coworkers, supervisors, experts and other professionals. Today more learners use tools like Google and Wikipedia to acquire new skills and knowledge. They subscribe to personal and professional blogs. Or they ask questions through their social media networks to get the most relevant answers from the members of their PLN.