Education

Pros & Cons Of Gamification In Education

Gamification In Education

Over the past few years, gamification has emerged as one of the best features of an LMS to increase learner engagement. It is very common for learners to lose interest in learning after going through text-based content or pre-recorded videos, and gamified content brings much-needed variety in learning.

With the onset of the pandemic, students now completely rely on online courses to continue their academic learning. Thankfully, tools like LearnUpon LMS simplify the process of accessing learning content from anywhere at any time.

Games have become an integral part of the young generation’s life, which makes it quite obvious that game-based learning elements are so popular in education now. But it is crucial to understand both sides of the coin before including gamification in learning. With this blog, we aim to highlight the pros & cons of implementing gamification in academic learning.

 

Pros Of Gamification In Education:

1. Makes Learning Fun

Who doesn’t like games? They entertain us and give us a sense of accomplishment. Gamified learning content is far more exciting as compared to basic videos and online classes with teachers. This leads to a more immersive learning experience and ensures students are motivated to engage with the learning content.

 

2. Keeps Students Engaged

Online teachers often complain about the decline in student engagement during online classes. Since there is a very one-sided knowledge transfer, students find online classes boring and monotonous. Gamified content, on the other hand, keeps students engaged with its reward points and leaderboard scores being updated in real-time.

 

3. Quick Results

Gamified content creates motivation in students to perform better than their peers in the assessments. Moreover, they can see where they stand by reviewing their results immediately on the leaderboard. The quick outcome creates enthusiasm in students to gain better knowledge and increase their scores.

 

4. Makes It Easy To Consume & Retain Information

Students often struggle with remembering the learnings from an online class or self-paced online course. This happens because the content is too complex. With microlearning principles used to structure gamified content, it becomes easy to absorb the information and retain it for a longer time.

 

Cons Of Gamification In Education:

1. Wrong Motivation

By delivering knowledge through gamified content, you are encouraging students to win in the assessments. But this does more harm than good as students feel more inclined to win in the games rather than focus on understanding the concepts. This reduces their focus from the learning content and motivates them to just get higher scores.

To prevent this from happening, make sure learning doesn’t mean simply collecting badges. It is crucial to not just have quizzes but also long-form assessments to gauge how well the students have understood a concept.

 

2. Gets Students Addicted To The Fast Pace

With the average human attention span being very low, it gets challenging to keep students engaged in learning. But with gamified content, they get used to the fast pace of learning and it reduces their attention span even more. Students lose interest in other forms of learning and it can get difficult to fulfill this need because of the high cost of developing gamified content.

This can be changed by keeping gamified content limited and combining it with several other learning styles like pre-recorded videos, online classes, students discussions sessions, debates, etc. This will offer variety and at the same time help in balancing out the pace of the learning content.

 

Conclusion:

Creating the right structure for academic learning requires a lot of planning and understanding of student engagement. By keeping these pros and cons in mind, you can implement gamification the right way for successful academic learning.

About the author

Editor N4GM

He is the Chief Editor of n4gm. His passion is SEO, Online Marketing, and blogging. Sachin Sharma has been the lead Tech, Entertainment, and general news writer at N4GM since 2019. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online technicality flows the expert industry coverage he provides. In addition to writing for Technical issues, Sachin also provides content on Entertainment, Celebs, Healthcare and Travel etc... in n4gm.com.

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