Instructional designers have another tool to create engaging materials, and that is gamification for eLearning. This means you introduce game mechanics into the quiz structure, for example, by adding some kind of level system where a learner goes up in difficulty as soon as they pass a series of quizzes. Or you could create a scoreboard that shows how students are doing while taking those quizzes.
But you need to follow a series of actions before implementing gamification in your eLearning quiz. In this post, we will list three actions you can follow to implement gamification in your eLearning LMS. In this case, we will build a Canvas LMS quiz (Canvas by Instructure.) In this example, I would like to cover three actions for building eLearning quizzes that go up in difficulty as the students passes each quiz.
Action 1: Why gamification for eLearning
Assessment is a key part of any eLearning course, and an eLearning quiz needs to keep students engaged or it will not be effective. A quiz could be a highly stressful situation and if the student is not engaged (or else, worried about their grade) so you need to design those with learners in mind. I know it is your course, and you are testing them, but the ultimate goal is to help them learn, so you must design the eLearning course with the students in mind.
Let me explain: while building a Canvas LMS quizzes for an eLearning course (a professor teaching the course asked for my help), I paused for a moment to take a break, took a sip of coffee, which I deserved because I had been entering both text and images nonstop for about two hours (at that time we did not have the license for the quiz import tool so I was manually entering content into the quizzes), I started thinking about those students that were supposed to take those quizzes later.
As I was explained by the instructor, they were supposed to take one quiz after the other, each quiz was supposed to open and close at a specified time and date, all of them were timed. I would cry if I were one of those students. I am sure at some point I would start randomly clicking on choices to make it stop as soon as possible (oh yes, I forgot to mention these quizzes were all multiple choice).
So, I started thinking that there must be a way of making these quizzes more engaging, while achieving the goal of gauging performance. Of course, you could space the opening and closing of quizzes for a span of days but then whatever material students learned during the last lecture would be forgotten by the time they take the last quiz, so they should take those quizzes as soon as possible.
Action 2: You must have an eLearning LMS that can facilitate gamification
In Canvas LMS you can place quizzes in a stacked order in the modules section of the course, in whatever order you want, but they will display in a list format. The modules tool allows you to set requirements and prerequisites in a module. In prerequisites, you can lock a module until prerequisites have been completed (such as completing another previous module, or a series of modules). Requirements set rules on how an item in the modules is considered completed (could be just by viewing or by achieving a particular grade, such as a quiz or assignment grade).
Faculty have expressed to me they wish the quizzing tool in Canvas would offer more interactive quizzes, as opposed to long quizzes with multiple choice questions that students have to complete one after the other. Is there a fun way to arrange quizzes in Canvas (our learning management system)?
You bet there is one. You could gamify the quizzes in a course using the modules tool in Canvas by creating a series of levels of achievement, each one can be accessed after a goal has been acquired, or a series of levels have been passed.
Let’s say you have a number of questions that you can divide in subjects and you need to check that students learn each subject before they move on to a new subject. Or you may want to check the level of expertise of students, they can start with basic questions and if they clear a threshold, they can move on to more complicated questions, or even skip whole sections if they demonstrate mastery on a subject.
You can set each quiz so that will become available after the student completes a series of goals or if they are able to demonstrate mastery of a series of subjects they may move to more difficult areas. You can also publish some kind of leaderboard to show those who have moved the farthest and the amount of time in which they accomplished this (Canvas does have a leaderboard but with limited output). You don’t need to publish the standing of every student, maybe just the first ten. This may motivate other students to engage more with the quizzes.
Action 3: Improve gamified quizzes
So, how do you improve on your Canvas LMS quiz? I can tell you that data will be your friend here. I did look at the statistics from the quizzes. Canvas LMS allows you to look at how students performed on each quiz question. This of course, lets you know if you designed the question properly, below a threshold, you could say the question needs redesigning.
You could also do exit surveys to gauge the perception of students on the gamified quizzes. For example, you could determine if the setup of using scoreboards or rankings actually makes them feel better, you can ask them if this setup helps improve performance. It might be that they feel more comfortable by going through stages, with no scoreboard, so they can challenge themselves.
One important part that you must accommodate in your Canvas LMS quiz is the ability to provide feedback to the student as they move on the series of quizzes. For example, if you use a series of stages by difficulty, you can explain how the new level compares to the previous one in terms of obstacles and difficulties they might experience during this new level.
Of course, there are still gaps that you may not cover due to the limitations of the eLearning LMS. For example, how can you assess if students are engaged during the whole experience? It is true you can ask the question on a survey but this will give you only a perception, not real time data. We know there are four types of learner engagement: emotional, agentic, behavioral and cognitive. Unfortunately, there are not enough studies addressing how each of these four types of engagement happen in a quiz in the context of gamification.
But I guess the most important question is: did they learn? And this is an area where you cannot find a lot of research. Maybe there is no interest in answering these questions, or getting actual data from studies is still difficult. Whatever the case, we only have best practices for implementing an eLearning quiz using gamification elements.
If you would like my help in setting this up in your Instructure course, send me an email and I will gladly help you. As always, find us in social media. You can share this content by using the buttons below. If you have questions and comments, use the form at the bottom of this page, or contact me directly, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you for reading this post.
Laura
Julio Castro