 G'day, Moodlers. I'm going to share with you a few ideas today that could help improve learner engagement and motivation in your online courses. We're not going to turn your Moodle Course into a game, but we will borrow some principles from gaming to fully enhance the learner experience. Gartner Research recently forecast that by 2015, more than 50% of organizations that manage innovative processes will gamify those processes. That's a pretty big deal. Gamification is ubiquitous these days. It is everywhere. You don't have to look too hard. It's used to influence human behavior in business, education, and life. To illustrate my point, here's a recent journey I took across the ditch to New Zealand. Well, you start by naturally booking a flight. I oftentimes fly with Virgin. I'm a member of their Velocity Frequent Flyer program. Of course, you can earn reward points every time you fly, and the name of the game is to achieve a higher status. I'm currently on silver status. I'd love to get to gold because, of course, that means additional benefits, things such as free access to their lounge, priority baggage, priority check-in, better seats at the pointy end of the plane, and so forth. So during my travels, I had to hire a car. And of course, there's a partnership philosophy has with an array of car hire companies. It's yet another opportunity to earn more points or redeem points that you have accumulated already. Even before I jumped on the plane on route to the airport, driving there, I see the billboards on the side of the motorway. Velocity's got a partnership with BP. Again, an opportunity to earn more points, so two velocity points per liter of fuel. So I'm at the gate waiting for the plane to arrive and looking there at the food court. I'm not even hungry and I don't even like burgers, but McDonald's has this promotion going where you can win instantly. So you not only eat at McDonald's these days, apparently you can learn and play. So we bought the plane. We take off and we're at 30,000 feet. I play my mobile phone and do a bit of language learning. Language apps are particularly good at this notion of gamification. So this is the Duolingo language app and I'm trying to learn Spanish. You're able to earn badges, status, and power-ups. You're able to also play with or compete against your friends and share your progress. You get the idea. Now Pokemon Go, you've probably heard a bit about this. It's been a global phenomenon around about half a billion downloads of their mobile app and about 20 million active users per day. It's massive demand as cross servers and at times brought the internet to its knees. Well, this is it. It's a mobile app. Here's a few screen grabs here. It uses augmented reality and the aim is quite simple. You need to catch all the critters. So what's the fuss all about? I mean, you know, it's affecting many people in many places globally. This by way of one news example I stumbled across in the Netherlands. The courts are taking the game developers in the antique to court. They're aimed to ban these small virtual animals because there's been a deluge of people inundating protected sand dunes in a sleepy seaside coastal valley somewhere in the Netherlands. So the impact is far and reaching. So what's the fuss all about? What makes this mobile app, this game Pokemon Go so successful? If you've got any thoughts? I think there's a few key things at play here. Certainly for the end user, the notion of engagement, fun, motivation and reward. So these are key gaming principles that the makers of Pokemon Go have really tacked into. What about in our context as educators? What if our students felt the same way about learning? How might that impact education? What might education look like? Well, there's an inherent problem with education for the most part. Ideally, we know that training shouldn't gauge the learner, but oftentimes reality is that learning experiences are mandatory. The learning experiences are either too easy or too difficult. They're boring, unrewarding or irrelevant to the learner at that point in time. So it's seldom the case that training is in fact fun or engaging. What could gamification be the solution? Is this going to be the way by which we make learning fun, motivating and rewarding? Just quickly to define gamification, it is this act or art of applying game principles to improve non-game things. So those non-game things may include business, education and life. So we've already seen, I guess, a few ways by which businesses are tapping into this notion of gamification. What about for us as educators and as moodlers? We're getting there very soon. Some gaming principles. So this is by no means an exhaustive list, but perhaps some of the ways by which games are successful. So the idea of being not too bored or challenged, sort of being in what's known as the flow in gamerspeak. It's essential that we balance positive and negative emotions. And by that we build resilience in our gamers. The sense of continual progression is very important, as is using extrinsic or external motivation to build internal or intrinsic motivation. We need to offer goals, rules, choices and feedback and naturally, status, access, power and rewards are very important to our end users as well. So can we borrow some of these key gaming principles to enhance learning? Well the formula is quite simple. We've just identified some key gaming principles. Let's look at ways by which we can apply these principles to our learning design and then we as educators are charged with the responsibility to facilitate the learning experience and enhance engagement and learner motivation. Okay, so the good news as far as Moodle goes, it's got an array of inbuilt features that can help us toward gamification. Avatars. You can see there the avatars, the little image or picture, the icon that we associate with your user profile. It's your online identity. It's used in many games in fact. It's oftentimes the first thing you do when you set yourself up for a game, you choose your character. In an educational context, it's how the learner or the gamer relates to their experience. Groups. So groups exist in Moodle. Okay, group may be Moodle speak for a class where you have sets of users undertaking a course or training concurrently. So groups promote this sense of belonging, belonging to a team and that in itself is very motivating for the individual. We've got activity tracking as well. So we can track learners as they step through the key activities of resources contained in an online course and on the same token, the learners sense this notion of progression and flow through a course. So there's, if you like, potentially a defined sequence. Okay, so they're making progress and they're sort of leveling up, if you like, much like in a game. On the same token, we can have rules around access. In Moodle, it's known as conditional access. So it may be a case of, you know, sort of viewing a resource, reading something first before you're able to access the next activity in the sequence. From an assessment standpoint, or even a revision perspective, we can enable what's known as the quiz results block. It's like a leagues table or a leaderboard. It promotes this competitive element in our online courses. And that in itself promotes the notion of resilience, because after all, we can't always be winners. So when we're tracking activities in a course toward completion, these can be aggregated to course completion. And there's a block that we can if we can enable and configure. That's the course completion status block. So you see a couple of snapshots here. It is all about goal setting and progression. So learners, if you like, have clear goals and objectives and a finish line in sight. They know at any point in time where they are and where they need to progress to. Badges. Badges is sort of like a 21st century certificate. It's a way for online learners to demonstrate knowledge and skills, and then maybe show off those badges to their peers, perhaps to prospective employers to land a job, or maybe to gain a promotion. So you can earn a badge in Moodle for simple things like completing, updating your user profile, maybe completing a task or an activity within a course, or completing the course itself. So the idea with badges is it gives status and power rewards. It motivates thought learner. And these badges with Moodle, it's very easy to connect. The badges earned in Moodle to the Mozilla backpack. And then from there, share these badges elsewhere on the web. So it can be on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth. So they were some of the core or standard features within Moodle that we can tap into to gamify. As far as plugins or extensions go, here's a few ideas. We've got the progress bar block, okay, and that works nicely with activity and course completion tracking. It's a more visual representation. You can see the color coding there as far as, you know, drained for activities or resources that have been successfully completed, red for things that haven't been completed, and blue perhaps for things that are either in progress or not yet available. So the progress bar can promote this sense of progression and flow for our learners. Level up. This is another block, and the idea is to motivate our learners and to provide them access to power and rewards, okay. So they gain experience and points and level up through a course as they complete activities. As far as configuring it goes, you can see here you can create rules and conditions. So, in effect, you know, it will be all about goals and rules. The learner makes choices and they're provided with feedback as they're leveling up. From a reporting standpoint, you know, we get a ladder, a leaderboard if you like, and we can see the various course participants, their level of experience, and their progress through the course, okay. So that in itself provides status to our learners, and it's very motivating. This is a new plugin called Stash. So this is all about power and reward and the idea that a learner has to successfully complete activities within a course, and as they do that, they accumulate objects, virtual objects, you know, they could be coins or swords or something similar. They, you know, they, they amass a stash and it unlocks other activities or experiences in the course. So when we configure this, I guess the idea that a learner must have so many of a particular object, so it's, you know, a conditional access setting that we can configure, and at any time we're able to run reports to see who has what stash objects in a course. This certificate, this is an oldie bit of goodie. Again, it's all about power, status, rewards, and motivating our learners toward the completion of potentially a course or any activity in a course, okay. So I guess a few caveats or red flags around what we've, what we've just discussed there. Well in the context of education, some of the research does indicate that gamification may improve learner engagement and motivation. That's tremendous. However, there's no clear evidence that this results in better learning outcomes, okay. So I suppose take what we've discussed with a grain of salt and, and certainly test for yourself. If you gamify some of the experiences in your online courses, make note of the, the results. You anecdotally, you may see, you may see some improvements in learner engagement motivation. Does that translate to better outcomes remains to be seen. Some references from today and in closure, I would like to say thank you for your time and interest. It's much appreciated. If you'd like to learn more about Moodle or Totara, feel free to reach out to us at any stage.