12 Brilliant Examples of Gamification in eLearning in 2024

Updated: February 01, 2024

More and more adults and children are educated entirely online these days.

With the events of recent years, it became obvious that a greater number of students could access both higher education and basic education if teaching programs were offered that were fully online. This has led to a big change in the way that learning and education outcomes are created and understood.

If you teach online, you might still be feeling your way through the process of finding the right curriculum and the right way to encourage student engagement and participation. This can be particularly challenging when it comes to high school-age students, but even adults can struggle to be motivated to connect with the content they need to learn.

If you are ready to learn more about eLearning gamification and what it can do for you, keep reading.

What is Gamification in eLearning?

Gamification in eLearning is the application of gaming mechanics like points, rewards, and storylines in non-game areas like teaching curriculum.

Gamification allows the mechanics that makes playing game fun to be applied to learning processes. Classic gamification tools are achievements that can be unlocked through studying, doing activities, and participating in class projects.

While gamification is often based on the common strategies that are used to create engagement in video games, gamification can also be linked with the kinds of actions that make traditional game styles fun too. Gamification creates layers of achievement and enjoyment that are not possible with learning that is based solely upon successfully taking a test or completing assignments.

How to use Gamification in eLearning

One of best ways to incorporate gamification in eLearning is to make it possible for learners to achieve smaller goals tied to "rewards" as they work through subject matter.

This might be achievements related to doing extra homework, participating in team activities, or any other kind of activity that you want to foster participation in. Gamifying learning processes can be easier than you think and can generate far more in the way of benefits for learning outcomes than some teachers realize.

Gamification can be specific to certain kinds of learning goals for the class, or it can be more general and be linked with the completion of an entire year of classes or other larger goals. There is really no limit to the ways that you can use your gamification strategy, so you can create the exact gamification bonus structure that you want to use for your students.

Gamification in eLearning

Gamifying eLearning can help make the process of learning on your own virtually much more fun and engaging.

There are people who are good self-motivators who never need a push to get up and get online to do their work, but many people need social interaction behind their learning to get real benefits from a class.

Learning along with other people working hard on the same goals alongside you can make all the difference in your ability to engage with the subject matter. Being rewarded for making an effort can also be a great motivator within this kind of learning structure, particularly if the subject matter is not exciting or not your favorite kind of information to learn.

Examples of Gamification in eLearning and Education

1. Story-based eLearning

Making your learning achievements part of a bigger story is one of the most common ways to add gamification to your eLearning curriculum. This is a very familiar experience for those who play online games or video games, as all of the actions within a story-based game will tie into the story. Being able to work on a story-based learning curve can make the entire process of learning much more fun.

2. Gamify eLearning with Friendly Competitions

While this is not always the right way to add gamification to your learning opportunities, competition between participants can make things much more engaging for your students. Many people enjoy healthy competition, and you can use team activities and other ways to get people to try to work harder as a way to gamify your teaching experience.

3. Use "Challenges" to Create Excitement

Offering added challenges that can be undertaken for extra credit or extra kudos can make any curriculum more fun. You will be able to design these activities to be as tough or as easy as you wish, and it will help to allow those who want to engage more in extra learning activities to add this work to their learning experience. You can also use these kinds of gamifying options in place of tests if you want to take some of the pressure out of your teaching but still check comprehension of the subject matter.

4. Reward Students for Completing Assignments 

Even something like a little badge that can be posted on a user’s profile to say they accomplished a goal or completed a challenge can be motivational enough to get students more involved in learning. These kinds of earn-as-you-go perks are common in gaming of various kinds, and everyone loves to get a little recognition for their hard work from time to time.  Rewards and badges can be a great way to help your teams to reengage with hard materials and have more fun while working toward goals.

5. Introduce Team Leaderboards

The leaderboard is a tried-and-true classic that can be used to track the results of your student’s efforts, and it can help to show the progress of team-based activities toward goal completion. Being able to see how far they have come can help students to really dig in to get to goal completion, and the leaderboard can also show teams where they need to focus their efforts as a group. For team-based activities, there are few gratifying tools that are as effective as the leaderboard.

Why Use Gamification in eLearning

Gamification makes the process of learning so much more fun, and it helps to keep people invested and active within your curriculum.

Gamification can also make it easier to learn and recall information and can help to encourage students to review learning materials and work on comprehension. The older methods of teaching related to repetition and by-rote learning still have merit, but modern students need something more fun to encourage them to engage in some of these older learning methodologies.

Being able to make learning fun can also help to foster a commitment to the subject matter and enjoyment of the learning process that is not likely to be present for most students without gamification. The series of small rewards boost your serotonin and can help with creative thinking and enjoyment of the learning process. Studies have shown that gamification engages the reward-seeking part of the brain and helps learners to engage with topics that they are not self-motivated or self-selecting to learn.

Gamification Platforms for eLearning

Setting up gamification for your learners can be easier if you access platforms that foster this kind of curriculum structure. If you are not a coder or have never built a computer program, you will need to get the help of a skilled programming team or a platform that is already built for gamified learning processes.

1. Scavify

Want to encourage team-building while you are also encouraging a goal-based learning structure? Scavify can help! Scavify can be used for a variety of different kinds of learning-based goal setting, and the app tracks the performance of teams as they engage in fun activities that are designed to help them to learn and work together effectively. From scavenger hunts to virtual learning opportunities, there is no shortage of really amazing ways to encourage learning engagement with this tool.

Scavify is well-known for its scavenger hunting tracking, and you can use your scavenger hunt activities to help boost knowledge and reward the efforts of those who have been working hard on their learning-based goals. This is an ideal selection if you want to plan a fun and memorable event that will also help your students to retain information and increase their knowledge on any subject.

2. EdApp

This is a really ideal choice for gamified learning, and you can select from all kinds of different gamifying tools to make the most of your teaching hours with your students. From leaderboards to rewards and scoring that are updated in real-time, there is nothing not to love about this quality platform.

Individual lessons can be gamified with EdApp, as can your entire arc of a class from start to finish. You can also make all of your learning information bite-sized so that people can get involved in the learning process in digestible lessons that are ideal for those who are on the go or for tough topics that require a lot of retention to learn. EdApp also awards badges for successes that can be displayed on users’ profiles, which is a great way to reward those who are taking your class for their hard efforts.

3. Mambo.io

This learning platform will let you create your own performance metrics that you want to measure and track, and then you can use these choices to guide the kinds of gamifying opportunities that you add to your lessons. This is a great choice if you want to make the rewards and the games that you are offering to your students specifically targeted at unique learning outcomes.

Mambo.IO also offers a unique coupon system that gives learners a chance to earn redeemable tokens from the points that they collect while they are working their way through class activities. The coupon structure can be really ideal for older learners, as it gives a sense of control to the experience, and it allows these users to create their own specific goal-setting structure within the gamification system. Your learners can guide their own efforts toward coupon-based goals to be able to earn prizes of their choosing.

This is a really ideal choice for those who are doing continuing education for people they work with, but also for older students who need to find added enthusiasm for tough subject matter or class that they are not natively invested in. Not everyone loves math or science, or English class, but earning coupons toward a fun final prize at the end of the class can be a great way to make these classes more fun and engaging.

4. Edgagement

This is more like a training tool than a learning platform, but it can make the right kind of content to help engage your learners when working on specific tasks or learning outcomes. You can create different versions of classic games to help engage your learners in fun-added activities that are an addendum to their overall learning experience. This is a great way to make learning more fun and to add some value to the process of memorization and practice of specific skill sets so that these processes do not become repetitive and boring to students.

This platform also allows you to create reports about engagement, completion rates, and knowledge gains, which can help you to identify areas where your teaching strategies are not working as they should. Knowledge gaps can be easy to track down and tackle when you use this tool, and your students might also self-identify areas for improvement on their own when using this platform.

5. Funifier

This is a gamified learning platform that can be used to increase engagement and also to foster healthy competition between learners. There is a leaderboard option within this tool, as well as a progress bar that is available to each student to help them to track their own processes. This is a tool that is often used for work-based continuing education, but you can also apply the benefits of this platform to learning in other settings.

The rewards catalog function of this tool is really ideal if you like the idea of a points or coupon-based reward structure. You can easily reward your learners with their own unique selections of reward types when you use the online rewards store option that this tool gives you access to. This is a great platform for older learners, and it can really help to increase engagement while also helping to foster a sense of healthy competition among your students or employees.

6. Centrical

This is really ideal training software to use if you need access to personalized microlearning for different scenarios. You can easily get your teams to focus on and enjoy learning about continuing education topics with this tool, and this is a platform that is built to encourage habit-forming work. Your teams of learners will be familiar with this habit-forming learning process since many apps that are offered these days use the same kind of system to reward and encourage continuing goal-seeking behavior.

This is also a great choice if you are not a designer by nature and you want to use templates with pre-built activities that your teams or students can immediately engage with to meet goals. You can access metrics, as well as reporting, with this tool as well and get performance data and feedback data as needed for your use to help increase and improve learning engagement.

7. Hoopla

This is a really great choice if you want to motivate a sales team to increase their performance. This is a fun tool that offers competitive leaderboard tracking, as well as eLearning opportunities and more. The basis of this app is a tournament-style learning opportunity that will give your sales team a chance to compete with one another and also to be more productive while meeting goals. There are many ways to encourage sales, as well as team-building with this tool, and many production teams enjoy the use of Hoopla just as much as sales teams do.

As an added benefit, learners can track their own performance toward unique goals or their own contributions to team projects when they use Hoopla. This is a really ideal choice for various kinds of working-based performance tracking and learning engagement, and you will find that there are many ways to optimize this tool for your use.

Gamification Can Offer Real Value to Your Teaching Efforts

Gamification can offer a lot of value when it comes to eLearning.

The lack of a social structure behind virtual learning can make it hard for some people to engage with the content effectively, and it can lead others to feel siloed and like they are not accomplishing any goals. Gamification provides additional motivation and fun to the process of learning a new subject or taking continuing education classes that would not be present otherwise.

For those who need a little push to retain information or to engage with a subject, the eLearning process can make all the difference. Gamification is a big part of many kinds of experiences these days, and the process of engaging with information and experiences in this way is very familiar to people of all ages. Due to the familiarity that people have with the process of its use, gamification can take your dry and boring class information and make it interesting and much more engaging.