Many professionals in eLearning are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning.

In this session, participants will talk about planning, developing, implementing, and supporting serious games for companies that have never gone down the route of serious games and gamified learning experiences. You will discuss what makes a serious game a success or a failure. You will also address the proper steps to take throughout each phase of the project to ensure success. Finally, you will learn about the best practices and pain points that Designing Digitally had to deal with when going down the route of gamification and serious games.

In this session, you will learn:

• Best practices of serious games
• What makes a good serious game
• The difference between gamification and a serious game
• What steps you can take to ensure a good serious game
• How to internally market a serious game
• How to get buy-in for a serious game

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Eight seconds: That’s the time you have to grab an employee’s attention. Five minutes: That’s how long you can hold it. Both are down by 50 percent in 10 years. Twenty-one: That’s the number of times people shift attention between smartphone, tablet, and laptop. What’s causing this attention deficit problem? Every day hundreds of emails, chats, texts, notifications, calls, and meetings compete for your employees’ attention. What tool can you use to grab and keep their attention? Training games. Games complement and improve the effectiveness of traditional training. Come learn more and play the Jump Game. High score at the session wins a $250 gift certificate.

Are you using a PowerPoint-based eLearning tool only using half of its capabilities? Do you wish that you could add gamification to your eLearning and/or classroom content, but you’re not a scripting or programming wizard? This session will explore several easy ways that PowerPoint-based eLearning tools can help you achieve gamification for your learning content without any typing of scripting/programming code. If you would like to learn some easy PowerPoint and QuizMaker tricks to achieve gamification, and you don’t have programming or scripting expertise, this session is for you!

In order to provide top-notch customer service, call center agents are required to master an ever-growing number of knowledge and skill sets during training, including sales skills, enterprise tools, products, and policies and procedures. As traditional assessments are often limited to isolated application, facts, or memorized data at lower-level thinking skills, they tend to fall short of testing whether the agents can actually apply their learning and perform on the job.

In this session, you’ll explore the benefits of using game assessments over traditional assessments in call centers, including how this approach can drive employee engagement. You’ll learn how to create game assessments for this environment that motivate employees with healthy competition and recognition for great performance. By the end of this session, you’ll have a repertoire of gamification techniques and methods that you can use to assess higher-order thinking skills and true on-the-job performance.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why game assessments are a great fit for call centers
• How games and game assessments can drive employee engagement
• How to create game assessments that motivate employees with healthy competition and recognition
• How you can apply gamification techniques to assess higher-order thinking skills and performance

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Segno Expertise learning platform, HTML/HTML5, and Articulate Storyline 2.

To support development of a graduate course on serious games at DePaul University, a yearlong study examined the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and assessments. Can you encourage people to experience failure in the spirit of learning? Can you build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process? Can you help people further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving?

This session will review the current research from Northwestern University, Temple University, University of Wisconsin, and Rosalind Franklin University on how serious games will provide a pathway to mastery, and illuminate why serious games are disrupting current training and development methodologies. You will learn about the important features of this new training and learning, including engagement and technology approaches, the time to mastery, and the latest examples of serious games.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to encourage adults to experience failure in the spirit of learning
• How to build reflection and immediate feedback loops into the learning process
• How to facilitate adults to further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving
• How to use natural language acquisition technology to engage your learners

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Many L&D professionals have found that the traditional approach to online courses doesn’t always generate consistent quality when it comes to learning outcomes. Because of this, it’s tempting to try new approaches to solve this dilemma, such as gamification and other strategies. But without a deeper understanding of how to apply these new approaches in a meaningful way, you could end up just using superficial applications of them and miss out on their ability to increase knowledge transfer.

In this session, you’ll learn more about how Remote-Learner has been able to take persuasive technology and gamification techniques and align them to proven instructional design approaches. You’ll review the company’s research into the impact of designing with persuasive instructional strategies. You’ll then find out more about the methodology it used to design and develop learning experiences that leverage the strengths of gamification to support a true transfer of knowledge

In this session, you will learn:

• What Remote-Learner discovered in its research into persuasive instructional design
• How gamification can be used as a persuasive strategy
• How to go beyond surface applications to take advantage of gamification’s strengths in knowledge transfer
• What designing with the intent to persuade learners and support knowledge transfer can look like
• What Remote-Learner learned from designing eLearning using persuasive instructional strategies and implementing them using the Moodle platform

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Moodle and approved add-ons.

In retail banking, like many regulated industries, the entry-level customer service employees have complicated jobs combining relationship skills, compliance with complex regulations, and adherence to frequently changing policies and procedures. Conventional wisdom still says these skills are difficult to learn effectively with online learning technology, particularly if the learning is self-directed.

In this session, you will learn how Capital City Bank turned a once burdensome onboarding program into one that engages and motivates new tellers. See how they tackled the onboarding challenge with a self-directed online learning experience that meets all five “moments of learning need,” offers intuitive performance support, provides career path opportunities for all tellers, and reinforces corporate culture.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to structure a single online learning journey intuitively for performance support, compliance training, and new-hire orientation
• How to apply gamification and communication approaches to attract and motivate participants in your own learning programs
• How to create personalized experiences
• How to create custom content on a budget

Audience:
Intermediate designers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Intrepid Learning’s learning experience platform—desktop, mobile, and tablet views.

Microlearning is a very potent tool to drive knowledge retention and behavioral change. This session will show you how to take advantage of what research says about gamification and microlearning, how to apply it to the employee journey, and how to correlate learning with performance measurement and learning paths.

Keeping employees engaged isn’t easy, especially in today’s easily distracted and multitasking workforce. And that’s where a solid gamification strategy comes in. Rather than approaching gamification by applying cookie-cutter, meaningless game mechanics to a program, you need to use a proven process to create cohesive, challenging, and collaborative gamification experiences.

In this session, you’ll look at how gamification design concepts, when applied properly to your learning programs, can inspire your employees to take action in ways that matter to your business. If you want to see sustained engagement, you need to realize that you have different motivations for playing than most of the people you encounter. To address that, this session will help you identify your own motivation profile so you can anticipate what elements will be missing from your design, where disengagement is likely to happen, and where the strategy is likely to fall apart. You’ll then look at a strategic approach to using gamification in a way that’s right for your content and your audience.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify your own motivation profile so you can anticipate what elements will be missing from your design
• How to increase learning and engagement through key concepts found in game design and behavioral psychology
• How to add the right game mechanics to training
• How thoughtful gamification can promote engagement, meaning, mastery, and autonomy in your workforce

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, managers, directors, senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.), and other facilitators.

Serious games and simulations have the potential to bridge abstract concepts and real-world applications. But too often, simulations limit themselves to lower-level skills like memorization, resulting in glorified quizzes that are expensive to produce but feel disconnected from real decision-making. And when serious games try to engage higher-order skills, they often do so ineffectively. The decisions that are rewarded may be subjective and arbitrary, leaving learners frustrated and disempowered.

Through case studies and group work, in this session you’ll uncover ways to use techniques such as badging, challenge scenarios, and working with imperfect information to accelerate past rote learning while providing a more interesting and fun learning experience. You’ll also learn how to apply critical thinking models in these experiences to help your audience identify assumptions, analyze arguments, and make better decisions. By learning techniques for measuring and improving critical-thinking skills in the context of serious games and gamification, you’ll open new pathways to building people’s skills in more meaningful and effective ways.

In this session, you will learn:

• How you can identify and model the higher-order thinking skills that can be improved by using serious games and simulations
• How to turn flat, quiz-like experiences into sophisticated, thought-provoking applications
• How to use game design mechanics to improve learner engagement while addressing higher-order skills
• What best practices you should use to create effective serious games and simulations

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and managers.

When you say the word “game,” you might think of first-person shooters, slaying dragons, racing cars, and fighting battles—all of the things that your manager does not want to hear. If you are uncertain of how to plan, design, and develop a serious (business) game, then this is the right session for you. Making a “serious game” acceptable to management and fun for the player is the goal.

In this session, you will first learn about the components of gaming, how to identify and incorporate your business goals, the mechanics of the game, motivators, storytelling tips, engagement techniques, game themes, rewards, challenges, and most importantly, the incorporation of learning. You will then be introduced to a process map that illustrates the components of the game, how they are sequenced, how training can be associated with challenges, and how motivators are used throughout to keep the learners engaged. Finally, you will learn how to measure the users’ pre-game and post-game knowledge of the desired learning topic.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the sequencing of elements within a game
• How to use a process map designed specifically for gaming
• About game mechanics
• About the importance of preparing an integrated action plan

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors with a mid-senior level of instructional design experience.

Technology discussed in this session:
Social media and the Carii game platform, which will incorporate chat, posts, video, metrics, etc.