In this LMScast, Kimba Cooper-Martin, a gamification specialist from Kimba Digital, discuss how course designers can make learning more enjoyable and interesting in this podcast episode.

In addition to discussing the drawbacks of “over-gamification,” which can put strain or stress on certain students, Kimba explores the psychology behind well-known platforms like Duolingo and explains why its leaderboards, buddy hunts, streaks, and badges function. She presents the concept of many player types achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers and explains why it’s crucial to comprehend these characteristics before introducing any game elements.

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Kimba also emphasizes the significance of ethical gamification, ensuring that users are aware of what they’re getting into and that the mechanics really help them achieve their objectives rather than controlling them.

She goes on to describe how Kimba Digital, her firm, assists course and membership owners in determining the motivation types of their audience, enhancing completion rates, boosting engagement, and including well-considered gamified components.

In order to increase attendance, keep viewers interested, and motivate them to do their assignments, Chris and Kimba conclude the session by going over real-world examples, such as utilizing badges in LifterLMS, including comedy or themes from your business, and utilizing Easter eggs or live challenges during Zoom trainings.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest from across the pond. Her name is Kimba Cooper Martin. You can find her@kimbadigital.com. While you’re over there, check out the freebies. You can find those on her menu of her oversight. But Kimba is an expert in gamification.

We’re gonna get into how to make learning fun. Again, and like all kinds of cool things you may not have thought about that you can do to make your courses and training programs more fun, more engaging. But first, welcome to the show, Kimba. 

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. I’m really glad to be here.

I’m excited to no doubt with you about gamification. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. We are definitely gonna do that. Let’s set the stage with an example instead of a high level, like what is gamification question. Let’s just provide an example that people would know. Potentially from Duolingo. I know that’s that’s really relatable.

Language learning is a, a niche within online education and a lot of people have tried it or seen people doing it. What makes Duolingo fun, addictive, and, compelling to continue with. 

Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, okay. Ang is a great example, but it’s also controversial. So I’m very excited to talk about this one.

And I love to use it as an example because they use lots of different game elements. They steal lots of things from the game world and put them into their learning platform. So things like streaks. Every day you log in, you keep a streak for a long time. I’m at 1050 days with my Spanish streak, which is I dunno if that just shows that I’ve addicted or whether they’re very good at what they do.

They do things like friends quests, where you work towards small challenges with a friend, a small mission, which is very similar to the games world. They do lots and lots of different things, badges, rewards, leaderboards, all sorts of different things. The controversial part though is that I have known people to stop using Duolingo because it’s over gamified.

Okay? They joined it because they wanted to learn a language, and what happens is they end up with this massive feeling of stress and I have to log in every day. I have to do X, Y, and Z. Or, I’m competing because I want to get up to the Pearl League, when actually what I want is to learn this language.

And I know that for some people it is over gamified, but that’s something really important to discuss as well, because, adding gamification into whatever it is that you’re doing, whether it’s a course or a launch or a community whatever it is that you are gamifying, it’s really important to think what is it that my users are hoping to get out of this experience?

Every time you’re gonna add something, because that will hopefully avoid you doing what some perceive GA Duolingo to have done, which is over gamifying. Now, this comes down to personality type as well. So for me, I just avoid the features that I’m not interested in. I don’t think about them, I don’t worry about them, but for some people, they can’t not think about those things.

It’s part of their nature that they wan