Designing and evaluating a gamified corporate elearning course

Abstract

In an increasing number of industries, employees are required to undertake online training courses which ostensibly provide them with essential job skills. However, these courses are often designed to rigid standards and generally focus on meeting minimum industry requirements rather than providing an engaging learning experience for employees. Consequently, much of these learning materials are soon forgotten and companies face a large loss in their investment. We propose that gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts, is a viable method of remedying learner disengagement in corporate e-learning. To this end, a user-centred design approach was used to gamify an existing corporate training course. Semi-structured interviews with a sample of corporate learners led to the selection of competitive game elements. A set of exemplary competitive elements were chosen from existing games and mockups were designed around these elements. User testing and refinement led to the final course design, consisting of confidence-graded questions, user challenges, and a leaderboard. A two treatment counterbalanced within subjects experiment was carried out using the non-gamified course as a control. In total, 15 participants completed both courses. For the purposes of the experiment, engagement was defined as “the outward manifestation of motivation,” and was therefore measured using the Interest/Enjoyment subscale of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory. Shapiro-Wilk testing on result sets showed normal distribution. Two-tailed paired t-testing showed a significant increase in intrinsic motivation in the gamified course (M = 4.344, SD = 1.214) over the non-gamified course (M = 3.389, SD = 1.358); t(13) =-3.533; p = 0.003. Consequently, it was concluded that competitive game elements substantially increase intrinsic motivation in the e-learning course. Future work will focus on testing a wider range of game elements, as well as repeating this experiment with a larger sample group. The research is expected to benefit both corporate learners and their employers.