Games and gamification are hot topics in eLearning, but it can be difficult to find good advice. Here are five resources from The Guild Online Events archives. These are available to members of The eLearning Guild at the Member Plus level.

Using Games and Gamification to Help All Employees Fulfill Their Most Important Job Responsibility. Sivasailam Thiagarajan and Tracy Tagliati. Handout, recording. Thiagi has figured out how to wrap a wide range of game designs, from the casual to serious, around different instructional content resources and procedures to make the task of learning more engaging and the work of assessment more authentic. To moderate his exuberance, Tracy brings a significant dose of wicked reality from the corporate firing lines of a multicultural and multinational organization. Together, they will share a realistic picture and several practical guidelines on how you can optimize the power of games and gamification for learning in your own organization.

Got Game? Using the Experience API for Personalized, Gamified Learning. Wendy Oliver and Margie Johnson. Handout, recording. Learn how, using the open-source Experience API (xAPI) and a learning record store (LRS), you can personalize and gamify learning experiences to enhance the learner’s experience and increase course completion rates. Although gamified learning can be more expensive to design, there are ways to increase the return on investment (ROI) and still support behaviorist learning theory.

A Free Online Repository for Finding Learning Objects and Building Games. Kim Larson and Bonnie Tomlin. Handout, recording. Explore Wisc-Online, the free online learning repository that contains both learning objects and an arcade of games. Wisc-Online—developed and managed by this session’s presenters and their team—offers thousands of learning objects that provide short, self-contained lessons covering a range of subjects, including computer science, career clusters, natural and social science, and more. GameBuilder, part of Wisc-Online, allows learning professionals and learners to create games that help reinforce foundational concepts.

Beyond Badges: Understanding Game Dynamics in the Social Age. Julian Stodd. Handout, recording. Explore 10 different game dynamics and learn how to relate these dynamics to social-learning approaches, mobile-learning approaches, or traditional training. Ideally all three! Moving beyond competition and badges, you’ll examine how you can use gaming approaches to build coherence and trust in communities, as well as using micro-rewards and input approaches to drive learner engagement over time. The aim of this session is to encourage you to think of more holistic and inclusive approaches to learning games that truly enhance competence, not just reward the gamers.

Getting Serious Organizations to Take Games Seriously. Joe Totherow and Kama Totherow. Handout, recording. Learn methods for designing effective games and—by shifting the focus of game design from the game interface (the look and feel of a game) to the game’s mechanics—getting those games taken seriously. You’ll get a close look at the complex world of game mechanics, explore how to leverage these mechanics in your instructional game design, and see real-world examples of how to use this approach to create effective instructional games that are taken seriously by serious organizations.