Gamification overview: plan levels and badges – Knowledge Base

Summary

Gamification is a powerful and engaging tool in eLearning, to encourage users to complete training. LearnUpon lets you design your gamification levels, and mark achievements with badges.

Gamification is available to all customers.

Before setting up the gamification feature, LearnUpon recommends you plan your levels and badges on paper, to help visualize how your users can reach the badges and levels.

For advice about setting up gamification on your portal, contact your Implementation Consultant or Customer Success Manager.

Gamification elements in detail

Gamification includes 4 elements:

Levels: 5 levels are available, to mark your learners' invested effort in eLearning
Badges: the visual element of achievement and participation for learning, activities and levels
Activities: actions which mark learners' engagement
Leaderboards and Widgets: to share your learners' achievements across the portal

You assign point values to levels, badges and activities. LearnUpon provides default badges for levels and activities.

Planning: start with levels

With 5 levels to use, learners enroll at level 1, which provides 4 more to achieve. Consider:

what learners need to cover in their eLearning
when in the users' learning you want to acknowledge their effort

Typically, learners meet the requirements of a level though some combination of learning badges, activity badges and level badges.

Within levels, consider how long it takes for your learners to reach level 5 within your portal.

Example 1: reaching a goal

It takes about 2 years to reach level 5 in your portal, and requires a learner to complete 20 courses. So a learner needs to complete 10 courses a year.

Assign point values to each level

From defining the levels, assign a number of points required to reach each level.

Example 2: sample level layout

Set Level 5 at 800 points.

Each learner enrolls on level 1 automatically. Learners need:

200 points to reach level 2
400 points to reach level 3
600 points to reach level 4
800 points to reach level 5

Add badges and activities so learners can collect points

Set learning badges to award when a learner completes a course or learning path. For each course, you can offer up to 5 different badges that you award based on criteria like score or course status.

Award activity badges when learners complete one of the following specific activities:

Start or resume a course, called Daily Learning
Purchase a course
Enroll on a course through the catalog
Download a resource from the library
Earn an external training credit, on portals using associations

Note: You can edit activity badges at any time, though changes aren't retroactive. If you change badge values, the changes apply to new learners only.

Decide which badges to award to which courses, and the point value for each badge.

Example 3

To move from level 1 to 2, a learner needs 200 points.

The learner needs to complete 2 courses valued at 75 points each = 150 points. For the remaining 50 points, you can offer other activity badges and assign them point values which make the goal of level 2 achievable.

Activity badges provide some "wriggle room" for activity on the portal. Be aware they can add up: for example, assigning points to daily activity can add up quickly.

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