If you are reading this article, it is fair the presume your organisation has ticked the first box regarding online education – that is, you have implemented a learning management system – hopefully, it is Moodle. If so, well done, clever choice!
Often times, the next consideration is the activities and resources (or content) to be put in the courses on the learning management system. For organisations who are new to online education, many start with the ‘low hanging fruit’. That is, any pre-existing resources, in electronic format, are uploaded to the online courses. Typically, the resources include documents, presentations, links to external websites and videos.
The obvious flaw of the ‘low hanging fruit’ approach is – there is seldom consideration for the learner, because quite simply, this is not a human-centred approach to learning experience design.
One of the most common challenges we hear about when talking with those responsible for online education is – learner (dis)engagement. Learners are not engaging with the online course. They find the course – boring, irrelevant, impractical, too easy, too difficult, dissatisfying, unrewarding, repetitive – or any combination of these.
Fortunately, Moodle has various standard features to encourage learners to engage with their course. For example, a team-based approach to learning can be promoted by organising individuals into groups, quiz results can be displayed in a block – akin to a leaderboard, badges can be earned for successfully completing an activity or course and learners can upload an avatar via their user profile page.
Moreover, there’s numerous plugins, which promote learner engagement. The plugins can be installed by your Moodle administrator or Moodle Partner.
Here’s 5 Moodle plugins to consider.
The easiest way to add gamification to your Moodle site and increase user engagement! Learners receive points for their actions, visualise their progress, compete with others through a leaderboard, and unlock content based on their individual needs and experiences. Retain learners, increase completion, and provide a stimulating education experience.
Create and add rich content inside your LMS for free. Easily create and recuse content. Use H5P to create interactive video, quizzes, collage and timeline. As you may know, in more recent versions of Moodle, H5P is a standard activity which can be added to a course – not plugin required. In fact, H5P resources can be stored in the Content bank – for ease of use, reuse and editing.
The game activity module makes use of questions, quizzes and glossaries to create offer a variety of interactive games. This module gets input from quiz, glossary or questions and plays some games. The games are hangman, crossword, cryptex, millionaire, sudoku, snakes and ladders and more.
Quizventure is an activity module that loads quiz questions from the course it’s added to. The possible answers come down as space ships and you have to shoot the correct one.
Block Game allows for gamification techniques to be used in a simple and uncomplicated way. Players can choose their avatar, see scores, rankings and progress.
So, there you have it – 5 ideas to gamify your Moodle courses. Feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about how to improve learner engagement in your online courses.
