#170: 5 Ways to Use Gamification to Engage Your Students

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina, on a two year here to get you stoked about your course creation, your marketing and help you build up your course based business of your dreams. And it’s been an interesting time. I’ve been talking on this podcast about my website going down and having some challenges with that, So I’m so excited to let you all know that a brand new website is now up. It is a product of a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and I’m so thrilled with my team. I’ve got some amazing new team members that just jumped in to help me get that going and I could not be more excited about the result. Now we’re still working out the details and tweaking and still updating. But just like your course, I had to go live with it without being perfect. I had to go live with a couple of things. Not quite in their places, knowing that it’s a living, breathing online asset that’s going to change every single day. And I needed to go with it like there was no waiting for perfection. There was no waiting for the right time. And it’s the same thing with your course, right? It’s a website. It’s a course, it’s a living, breathing online piece. So, there’s no perfect time. You got to take a leap and jump in and know that everything is going to be great and you’re going to continue to evolve as a course creator and your course is going to continue to evolve and change and update. So, I’ll link to the new website in the show notes. You can let me know what you think and today I want to talk about how to get your students across the finish line using gamification. Now, I’ve talked on this podcast before about getting your students across the finish line because we all have heard the really sad stat that you put all this work into your course and then your students don’t finish or they even get to the
first module and don’t go beyond that. I was just looking at this social post the other day saying that you put 1000 hours into your online course and only 10% of your students finish it. Well, one of the great pieces to help them finish it and maybe get that 10% up to closer to 50 or 60, even 70% is gamification. And I’ve got a definition right here for gamification. Those of you who aren’t as aware of it is. It’s the application of typical elements of game playing, point scoring, competition with others, rules of play to other areas of activity to encourage engagement. Now, that’s a really important thing here, right? To encourage engagement. That last part you’re using gaming principles in a course context. You’re earning points or badges. You’re driving a competitive spirit to keep them engaged. Now, let’s be honest, there’s a competitive spirit in all of us driving us to succeed and knowing that we’re closer to the goal or that you’re getting points. Sometimes this really drives people to finish their courses, their programs, whatever they have set out to do. And by the way, sidebar, this is not for everyone. I was running with my friend Maria the other week and we were doing about three miles and I’m the person that wants to know the milestones, like what’s every mile that we’re running? What’s the last half mile that we’re about to finish So I can do a little cheer as I hit each milestone. So I’m asking my friend Maria, because she knows the route. Hey, where are we? How much longer? So my friend Maria says to me, Well, Oh, I’m not sure, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get there eventually. Enjoy the journey. Because for Maria, when she runs, she loses herself in the run. And being outside and in nature and doesn’t want to
think about the milestones, her jam is just losing herself in the run.

Now that drives me bonkers. My A-type personality doesn’t like that. I want to know what’s next, What are the milestones I need to cheer myself on. This is how I keep myself motivated and engaged, right? So that didn’t motivate her, but that motivates me. So, know that gamification is an incredible tool just based on that little silly story that I just told. And we’re going to talk about some different ways that you can use gamification inside of your course and you’ll know some of your students will go for it and some people will say, No, thank you, I’m not a fan. Just like some of your bonuses apply to some students and they love it. And others are saying, Hey, that doesn’t really apply to me. Either way. It’s a great tool for you as a course creator. By the way, part of the reason gamification works is it gives us a shot of dopamine. When you get a badge or say an alert pops up on my Fitbit. I’ve talked about that before on this podcast. I’m halfway to my goal in terms of my workout minutes that stimulates my brain and it releases dopamine, which makes me feel good. Okay, So when we use badges and scores and progress bars, it gives people that hit and allows them to get excited to engage even more in your course. It just makes it enjoyable overall, which we want them to feel with your course. Because sometimes courses might feel challenging,
they might feel like a task is just another chore and we definitely don’t want to make our program feel like just another chore.

We want it to feel fine, right? We want to give them a sense of progress. We wanted to feel like fun. We want to give them a sense of progress. All right. So for all these reasons, I want you to try this on if you’re not doing this already. So let’s break down how you can implement gamification inside of your courses. If you’re not doing this already, or maybe you spark some new ideas for you. The first one is progress tracking. Now, I’ve done a ton of courses that implement this kind of progress tracking in terms of your video within your lesson or the module or the course overall. So for example, it could say you’re tracking your progress within a certain lesson and say you’re 70% done watching the video, or you can track your progress overall in the course or say when you’re taking a quiz or a survey. I know I appreciate when I’m taking your survey and it says you’re 40% done so I can manage my time and I can manage my energy. And honestly, it inspires you to keep going, especially if you’re more like 50 or 60% done. Any time that we have a progress bar that leads to the ultimate outcome, I think it’s helpful. And that’s not hard to put in your courses, by the way. You just want to think it through. So if you have a starter course and let’s say it’s ten or 12 lessons, then it might not be as important because they’re zipping through it. You might have shorter lessons like 4 minutes, but if you have a longer course, it’s like five, six, seven modules. Maybe you’re taking quizzes at the end of each module. It’d be nice to have a progress bar to cheer people on to help them know where they stand. But if you have a bigger course, say, five, six, seven modules, progress tracking is really helpful. You might want to go module by module and track their progress or overall, think about how you can implement some progress tracking in terms of your course. Here’s another gamification principle. So starting with a win and then building and stacking, so as you progress in the course, it gets progressively more difficult. So you start with a quick win, which I want you guys to do anyway, inside of your course, inside that first lesson, that first module. Then as you go deeper, they go from that 101 content to 201, 301, 401. It gets more advanced now, starting with a win and progressively increasing the difficulty of your course draws on the game design principle of leveling up. So too bad my son’s not here. Tristin. He can talk all about leveling up because gamers typically begin with easier levels to build confidence and skills As they progress and improve, the challenges become harder, right? Like the boss that you have to fight at the end of a level is tougher. He’s not a pushover. He or she is not a pushover as you progress in the game. So this gaming principle then translate to our courses by what I said before, starting with that 1 to 1 or beginning content to then intermediate to then advanced content as you go through the course. Another way to gamify your course is to offer point systems and use that toward rewards. So for example, in Kajabi communities you can get points for commenting, for asking questions. Same with social media channels, right? You get top contributor badges and things like that. Now that doesn’t motivate me as much, but some people really love this. They love to be acknowledged because they’re speaking up. They’re an ambassador for your course or for your program, and you can reward those ambassadors. Maybe they get a special one on one call with you or access to something special that no one gets. And as a thank you for being your ambassador, another piece of this that you can do is social sharing and encouraging your learners to share their and chief mentors inside of Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn. Here’s some ideas of how you can have your students share their experiences. For example, you can create specific hashtags, for course, milestones. You can encourage your students to post video testimonials of their learning journey or you can share before and after snapshots of their progress. All right. Another system that you could do for gamification is unlocking action based content. So based on how successful and engaged they are and how far they get in your course, they unlock additional content. Like, I really love this idea because I’m a proponent of embedding surprises along the way. I’ve talked about this on the podcast. I’m always a fan of that. It’s it’s a surprise bonus that gets unlocked once they reach a certain point in the course. So if it’s a five module course, maybe they reach the fourth module and they unlock this special bonus. So for me, sometimes I embed surprises of workshops I’ve done in the past. I’ve done some our CART workshops that didn’t maybe work in the context of the course, but it was really good content. So I’ll surprise my students with that content later on. So if I think about my six week accelerator, which is self-paced right now, once you get to the marketing piece and how to sell, I could unlock workshops that I’ve done on how to sell on webinars, so I wouldn’t unlock that until maybe the fifth week. So it’s a six week program. Later on, I want you to have the foundation. I want you to get pretty far in the program before you unlock this action based content learning. And by the way, I hope everyone makes it to the end of my program. They get through to the sixth week because that’s a six week accelerator. And part of the gamification of my course is that you put your homework in every week. You have to actually submit it for my review every week. So it’s one little thing that I do to hold you accountable and make sure you get it done. Now, I could add points to that, right? So every time someone puts in their homework, you get ten points. You build up points to a reward. So maybe I’ll market that surprise. Maybe it’s that olive cart workshop I was just talking about. Well, hopefully that gives you some lay of the land in terms of gamification and you’ve got some ideas stirring in your head. And by the way, don’t try to do this all at once. Right? As always with our workshops, we’re going to start with one that you can play with. Then try out with your audience. Then you can layer on a different style every time you launch your course or rerelease your program. Remember, the key to a memorable course is not just in the content, but in the experience that you create for your students. So try to take a page out of a gamers playbook and bring on these elements of fun and challenge and achievement.

Share your stories and successes with me. Tag me on Instagram or hit me up on LinkedIn and I would love to celebrate your wins with you. If you have found value in this episode, please leave me a review until next week. Go create, be you and be brilliant and get it done.