Serious games vs e-learning

Are you looking at digital solutions for education and training purposes? Are you struggling to grasp the nuances between a maelstrom of new terms and disciplines you didn’t realise existed before? Do you know the difference between e-learning and serious games? Are you hoping we can just park these terms as being interchangeable with gamification?

It can seem complicated at first, but the distinctions are easy enough to draw, and those distinctions are important. Knowing what serious games are, and what makes them work, is essential for effectively utilising serious games for learning. In this article we’ll break down the differences between e-learning and serious games, and how serious games can be effectively incorporated into programmes of e-learning.

Defining e-learning

To simplify it, e-learning is just an abbreviation of electronic learning, typically in a digital format. Any learning or training activity in an online space comes under the umbrella of e-learning. Classic and early examples of e-learning are a bit like a digital book that occasionally requests feedback from the user, or some other form of interactive engagement.

E-learning courses offer a level of flexibility to the education provider, in that they don’t need to staff a physical space to teach a lesson, and to the student, in that they can access learning materials anywhere through a laptop, tablet, or a smartphone. E-learning is typically administered alongside more traditional classroom or seminar-based learning, as while it offers flexibility, blending it with more traditional teaching allows for interaction, engagement, and for students to ask questions.

Serious games for education

Online serious games always come under the e-learning umbrella, but e-learning doesn’t always take the form of serious games. A serious game is a game designed with a serious purpose at its core, and is not primarily intended as a form of entertainment. However, a serious game should still follow the typical gaming structure, and additionally offer some serious purpose. There are many different types of serious games, and many applications where serious video games can be effective, but they are especially utilisable in the fields of education and training.

To draw the distinctions further, let’s talk about gamification. Gamification is the application of game elements to traditionally less playful tasks. Points, progress bars and leaderboards are all game elements that can be added to areas of training or education to make it more engaging, but simply adding points doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve made a game of something. In the most basic terms, gamification takes game elements and applies them to education to improve engagement, typically e-learning, meanwhile serious games embed educational purpose within gameplay. In some ways, a serious game is the combination and the evolution of e-learning and gamification.

The advantage of serious games

The big advantage to online serious games is that they offer you data collection through feedback from your students on how they are getting on. Serious game training, applied to an educational setting, offers a student the opportunity to learn through play, in a repeatable, consequence-free experience that can complement their studies. They’re not necessarily just showing that they’re paying attention by answering a few questions after finishing a chapter of text, they’re playing through an immersive narrative.

For example, the Dynamic Path™ format on Drimify allows you to fully customise a learning pathway of interactive modules and mini-games to engage your students in targeted subject matter, giving you access to all the game engines on the Drimify platform. Each level of your learning pathway can be adapted to allow you to create a narratively immersive experience filled with relevant game play, with each level they play feeding back data to help you assess your students, and analyse the effectiveness of the game, allowing you to improve future versions.

An innovative e-learning tool in a dynamic and appealing format

An online serious game is interactive, and allows you to monitor a student’s progress through data collection – both pertaining to their proficiency of the necessary skills or acquisition of the required knowledge, and also in terms of how many times they are playing the game, and how much progress they’ve made. This means you can assess whether a serious educational game has been a successful component of your e-learning course, or if it can be improved or fine-tuned.

The video game format has a broad appeal to students from primary and elementary school-age, to secondary and high school-age, and even into the workplace for corporate and on-the-job training. Online serious games for education are a great tool to tap into that popular medium and help students with their studies.

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