Supplementary Learning: The Future of Education? – Part 1: Gamification

While researching gamification last year, I noticed that despite the generally positive reception it receives, there are still a significant number of educators opposing its usage in conjunction with traditional learning. In fact, this pattern also occurs for other forms of supplementary learning, such as microlearning. It might be easy to dismiss these detractors as simply resistant to change, but when teachers across the world - both within academia and on social media - are collectively reporting the same issues, I think it's important to hear them out.

Educators repeatedly stress how supplementary teaching methods like gamification, game-based learning, or microlearning do more to distract students than instruct them. In their experience, learners often fixate on the "gimmicks" themselves, such as accumulating badges or ranking on leaderboards, rather than internalising information. Moreover, learning is often a tedious process for a reason, as concepts can be complex and interconnected. Attempting to reduce these into bite-sized chunks or haphazardly attaching extraneous bells and whistles can remove nuance and ultimately deprive students of the time and effort it naturally takes to process tough content.

There are numerous other critiques, and it's challenging to distinguish between problems inherent to these learning methods and problems that occur only because they're being misapplied. These educators are justifiably frustrated: what’s the point of implementing these tools in the first place if they appear to interfere with the learning process and waste valuable resources?

The Answer: Context

I think that, ultimately, most problems concerning supplementary learning methods stem from failing to recognise their appropriate context. Continuing our gamification example, Margaret Robertson (2010) has a fascinating piece on how gamification is largely misunderstood, misattributed, and ends up a misnomer. She claims gamification is often reduced to merely scoring systems (badges, leaderboards, etc.) – what she terms “pointsification” – and, in the process, both “misrepresents games” and “devalues points”.

It misrepresents games because it often omits their most fundamental and engaging facet: play. Game designers spend years honing their craft, creating intriguing gameplay loops to intertwine with powerful narratives, art design, cinematography, original soundtracks, and so much more. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, nor are games required to include all of these elements (often they do not), one thing is certain – the use of the label “gamification” to denote just one small subset of game design might appear disingenuous. When institutions employ gamification techniques and expect the same engagement or results as a full game, they set themselves up for failure. This comes from misunderstanding the term and conflating gamification with game-based learning.

In contrast, it devalues points since, despite all of the above, badges and leaderboards are extremely powerful motivational tools. There’s a reason that every major online game heavily utilises ranking systems; they massively drive engagement when used in the correct context. Proponents of gamification are right: for instance, there’s significant academic evidence illustrating how badges and leaderboards have net positive effects in the classroom when implemented judiciously.

To reiterate, the problems stemming from supplementary learning aren’t usually to do with the techniques themselves, but rather lie in their overzealous application. Scott Nicholson (2012, 2015) argues at length for gamification to be "meaningful" - that is, user-centric, encouraging intrinsic motivation, and, ultimately, having the goal of weaning the student off the gamification treadmill to instead interface with real-world scenarios of their own accord. Again, Robertson puts it best:

In this blog, we've focused primarily on gamification as an example of how supplementary learning is likely to shape the future of education and its potential caveats. Next week, in Part 2, we'll be focusing on microlearning: arguably an even more salient form of supplementary learning.