In edTech product design circles, we often talk about gamification as a way to reach young learners. After all, using game mechanics in edTech products is a proven way to increase student engagement. Designed with intention, game mechanics can also reinforce learning goals and pedagogical strategies, making your product more effective and valuable.

But there are good reasons to consider gamification for teacher-facing products, too. Corporate learning has long used game mechanics to tap into powerful intrinsic motivators that all humans share, including autonomy, mastery, purpose, and social interaction. If these motivators sound familiar, it’s because we often use the same principles to describe user goals that surface in UX research findings!

Incorporating gamification into learning products for teachers will also impact your bottom line. With regular use, game mechanics make it more likely that teachers will use your tool with fidelity, giving you long-term data on teacher efficacy and other success measures. Whether you’re designing a professional learning product or an assessment tool, edTech products are ripe for this type of business opportunity.

Below, we break down how gamification intersects with the teacher persona and discuss three ways game mechanics support verified user needs. Let’s dig in!

Gamification and Your Teacher Persona

Consumer design is a constant source of inspiration for solving UX and design problems in edTech. And the commercial sector has already figured out delightful ways to gamify their products to build engagement.

Remember: teachers are people, too! They use all kinds of commercial software, from fintech to Weight Watchers to Duolingo. We can apply the gamification mechanics teachers are used to seeing in other parts of their life to edTech tools that improve teacher efficacy or help teachers meet professional goals. 

By better understanding the motivations and goals of educators, edTech brands can target their teacher personas with age-appropriate gamification. Simple, delightful rewards and feedback systems inspire better professional learning and increase teacher fidelity to specific curricula or pedagogies.

For example, all educators must complete state-mandated professional learning, including earning continuing education credits. If you design reward systems in your software as a way to build momentum in their professional learning endeavors, you’ve created an easy win for your teacher persona. The administrators, principals, or coaches who must track engagement, completion rates, or other success measures will be happy, too.

Ultimately, the pandemic changed teacher familiarity with technology for the better. They’re not only used to digital learning tools, they also have higher expectations for the edTech products they consume and advocate for. When product owners are able to deliver on those expectations by drawing from consumer trends like gamification mechanics, teachers notice—and find real value in the tools that help them succeed.

Boosting Teacher Engagement with Gamification Features

Incorporating game mechanics into teacher-facing edTech products drives important behaviors around professional learning. Whether your features provide crucial feedback systems or build positive behavior over time, game mechanics will build momentum and boost user engagement.

Here are three common engagement strategies gamification mechanics support:

• Improving teacher efficacy. Encourage teachers to use your tool with more fidelity by gamifying onboarding or feature exploration. If you can find a way to introduce fun and rewards, you’ll encourage teachers to complete initial tasks that will help them learn how to engage more fully with your product.

• Providing teacher feedback. From just-in-time quizzes to testing for understanding, your tool can give teachers data and feedback in a way that helps them see their improvement over time.

• Building positive behaviors. Encouraging streaks is also a great way to show teachers how they’ve built a habit that they don’t want to break. When users see that repeated actions lead to feedback and rewards, they’re excited not to break from that behavior.

How Gamification Increases Feature Adoption

Game mechanics are a simple way to encourage educators to try out new features. Right now, teachers are less afraid than ever of “breaking” learning tools by experimenting or trying new things. Help them continue to develop bravery by showing them how easy and low-commitment your new feature is.

This strategy is beneficial from a product standpoint, too. The best way for your users to understand the full value of your product is by exploring new or advanced features. You want them to feel comfortable incorporating new features in their day-to-day work. If the goal of your product is to help teachers make a bigger impact on their own professional development or to improve outcomes in their classrooms, you want them to adopt the features that will help them do so.

Teachers are especially apt to try a new feature if it’s clear that there’s a minimal time commitment. Use game mechanics to show your user that tackling things a little bit at a time leads to progress toward a bigger goal. For example, maybe your software attaches an award to completing a very short task. Or perhaps you can help teachers break bigger professional learning goals into smaller pieces.

Teachers will feel like it’s possible to complete a complex, required training in smaller increments, while still getting all the benefits of your professional learning content. This is a huge win for teachers who have limited time to learn new tools or complete a 30-minute training session in one sitting. 

Most gamification features demonstrate forward momentum or progress in a visual way. After all, when teachers see how far they’ve come, it seems more valuable to continue. Whether they earn stars and badges or check off items in a digital road map, it’s important for your users to get excited about completing tasks. 

Consider how the task planning tool, Asana, designed flying unicorns and brightly colored walruses to reward its users for powering through a to-do list. Teachers need to experience delight, even as they are reminded of the evidence of their progress—especially if progress in your tool means improving outcomes in their classrooms.

Increasing Efficacy By Gamifying Improvement

Engagement in edTech products is more complex than in commercial products. After all, you’re not trying to boost usage hours of a product just for the sake of it. 

The stakes are far higher.

In edTech, the goal is often for educators to use a product more effectively and improve learning outcomes in their classroom. Or, if you’ve designed a supplementary tool, the goal might be to give teachers broader context for teaching a specific content area and making a bigger impact as a teacher.

Because of the importance of showing improvement over time, edTech is very good at measuring outcomes. If you can reflect these outcomes back to educators, administrators, and parents, you’ve solved a real need for each of these personas.

When educators engage with a product and see real evidence of its impact in the classroom or in their own confidence levels, you’ve established the most meaningful reward and feedback system of all: empowering teachers with tools for their success.

How A Gamification Technique Helped Educators Use Listening to Learn More Effectively

Listening to Learn, a professional development tool that helps teachers assess students’ numerical reasoning skills through oral interviews, provides instant feedback and reasoning through its “Labs” feature.

Educators watch a short video of an expert interviewing a student. Next, they’re asked to identify which problem-solving and reasoning skills the student demonstrated throughout the recorded conversation. 

When a user chooses a response, they instantly discover whether they answered correctly—and get just-in-time feedback about the answers an expert would have chosen. When users are correct, it feels like they’ve gotten a reward: an expert in numerical reasoning skills agrees with their assessment!

This type of gamification works well for Listening to Learn, a product that represents a paradigm shift in professional development. Teacher training in numerical reasoning and problem-solving skills does not often incorporate process skills. In English Language Arts, on the other hand, it’s much more common for teachers to receive training on how to identify reading comprehension and other ELA process skills.

Powerful shifts in pedagogy can be new and scary for many teachers. Listening to Learn asks math educators to think about using process skills in a different way. It also asks them to reconsider their role as a teacher by listening to evidence of how a student thinks, rather than solely reviewing written work. By incorporating game mechanics, Listening to Learn helps educators develop this new skill in a safe environment, with immediate feedback from an expert. 

Bite-sized lessons also make the content easier to digest, and expert feedback serves as a reward for making progress. Without ever feeling overly commercial or “kiddish,” Listening to Learn motivates its users and ensures that they’re becoming more effective interviewers in the classroom.

Consumer technology will continue to shape teachers’ expectations for learning tools, especially as the pandemic accelerates technology adoption. Because of this, edTech brands will find more business reasons than ever to incorporate UX and design elements like game mechanics into their products. 

Whether these strategies help teachers use learning software more effectively in the classroom or in professional development contexts, there are many ways gamification can feel sleek, professional, and supportive. Gamification isn’t just for kids, anymore—it’s for teachers, too!

Are you considering how to use game mechanics in your teacher-facing products? Find out how Backpack Interactive can help with UX research or a workshop! Reach out in our “Let’s Talk” form.

Whether your LMS helps users review videos, work through interactive experiences, or read .PDF resources, designing content that creates a user-friendly information hierarchy for students is a major challenge. 

For starters, your users likely have many different content needs. Are they tackling lessons asynchronously on their own time, or are they visiting your LMS to download resources to use later? Maybe it’s both?

No matter what kind of edTech tool you’re building, students need content that’s digestible, affirmative, and self-contained. That’s especially true for your LMS! 

From readability to content sequencing, here’s everything you need to know as you rethink your learning content for a new digital space.

1. Make learning content digestible

Readability and scannability are especially important when it comes to structuring learning content in your LMS. 

After all, our design  goal is to help students access and process information to learn or practice new concepts!

For example, when users see a block of text on a screen wider than 500 pixels, readability goes down. That’s guaranteed to make your engagement metrics nosedive.

Help students digest information by:

• Using design choices that lead to a high degree of legibility. Content should help your users distinguish separate sections and prioritize calls to action.  
• Using best practices for your typography choices, like these guidelines from DesignModo. Legibility is affected by all the decisions your design team makes about paragraph width, line length, leading, typeface, and more.
• Using visual cues to indicate that students are moving forward and encourage them to work toward their goals.
  

As you make changes to address readability issues, be sure to test with users. You can also check back in with product success teams to ensure that you’ve successfully designed your content. 

The more data you collect, the easier it will be to determine if student users are engaging with—and learning from—your content.

2. Embrace content sequencing

Part of the appeal of using a learning management system is giving your users a choice about how they move through content. Teachers want flexibility in setting up course sequences for students. Students want to be able to tackle content at the pace that works best for them.

In order to do this, however, you must evaluate each individual piece of content as a discrete component of your LMS. Your content can be broken down into pieces that make up a complete lesson, resource, or class and staged to help your users learn more effectively.

Once you’ve categorized your content and created a meta-tagging strategy and user flows, it’s time to strategize engagement with content sequencing. 

All users want to feel like they’re making forward progress, especially if they’re working on a long or challenging task. By presenting content in a way that won’t overwhelm your users, you allow them to work at their own pace and make their own choices about learning.

Students need help tackling big concepts or staying engaged for longer periods of time. Consider these sequencing strategies to boost user engagement: 

• Introducing progress monitoring
• Breaking up content into multiple screens
• Integrating badges for achievements
• Incorporating wizards and other helpful tools

These engagement strategies are especially important for content sequencing in edTech. Students often log onto an LMS to read an entire book or take a long assessment. By helping users anticipate how much time they should spend on any given screen, content sequencing makes a user’s experience coherent, pleasant, and even fun.

3. Design with student affirmation in mind

In any learning experience, there are natural moments where users should feel a sense of accomplishment. 

Celebrating milestones is especially important for students’ social-emotional learning and growth. When students accomplish goals, they stay more engaged and develop the grit they need to push through challenging problems.

Affirmations don’t necessarily have to be goal-oriented, either. They could be progress-oriented, rewarding students for reading for AP History or tackling a series of math quizlets. You might even include animations that reinforce your sequencing work or make content feel less intimidating.

Affirmations create a more delightful and supportive student experience. Whether students are working asynchronously or independently, your LMS can be there to provide feedback and support in real time.

4. Provide direct views for your resources

Have you ever clicked on a link for a .PDF and found yourself on an entirely different server? It can be frustrating, especially for students.

Whenever users are pushed out of your LMS, you’re more likely to lose them. But that’s not the only reason to keep things contained. Direct resource views have the added benefit of helping you protect your intellectual property (IP). 

Both off-the-shelf and custom learning management systems can be designed to protect your .PDF resources and other downloads by embedding content directly into the experience. You’ll also get better engagement metrics using this strategy, which can help you continue to improve your product.

A well-designed learning management system has many advantages. You can deliver powerful content at just the right moment to support your users’ needs and evolve your content strategy over time.

By sequencing and designing content to support the lifecycle of your product, you’ll stay one step ahead in the edTech marketplace. As you receive customer feedback and conduct user tests, you can refine your LMS into an ever more valuable edTech tool for years to come.

Are you building a custom LMS or tailoring an off-the-shelf system? Contact us below to chat more about user research, accessibility, and content sequencing.