Updated on April 18th, 2019
Online courses can be made more engaging, interactive and exciting for the learner’s by inducing a small tint of gamification. Gamification is the process to engage, motivate and enhance the learner engagement by using game mechanics and games. Out of box Moodle supports gamification only to a low extent.
There are lot of ways to gamify your Moodle course and many plugins which can be used to enhance the gamification effect. Moodle Plugins can be used to extend the functionality which is not provided in the core.
In this article, I am going to list down the top 6 Moodle plugins which can be used to gamify your Moodle course.
Top Multiplatform Gamification Tools
H5P
H5P – One of the most talked about HTML5 based interactive content platform. H5P moodle plugin allows you to create different interactive contents in your Moodle course. Some of the H5P content types for gamifying your Moodle course are: Memory Game, Personality Quiz, Course Presentation, Arithmetic quiz etc. Download the H5P Moodle plugin from Moodle plugins directory here & Check out different H5P content types here.
Badgr (Multiplatform)
After Mozilla Open badges shutdown, Badgr became the defacto tool for digital badges. Canvas LMS adopted Badgr as its native badge solution. In a Canvas community post, Ohioan Ryan Corris talks about deploying Badgr into “Mastery Paths.”
http://lmspulse.com/2018/credentialing-systems-today-blockchain-and-why-mozilla-out-from-open-badges-was-the-right-move/
Gamification plugins for Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS
Level Up!
Level Up! – Let the students earn experience points based on their actions within the course. It will show the current points in a block and learners progress towards next level. Even you can configure to congratulate the learners once they reached the next level. Download the Level Up! plugin here.
Mootrain — Mootivated
Mootrain\Mootivated – The most recent kid on the block which allows you to reward your learners with virtual coins for learning in Moodle. Learners can use those coins to customize the avatar with different items. Please note that Mootivated needs a paid third-party subscription based service to connect your Moodle site.
Game
Game – One of the best Moodle plugin in the last decade and among the most downloaded plugins. Game Plugin allows you to create interactive games by using questions, glossaries and quizzes. It includes 8 games which are: hangman, crossword, cryptex, millionaire, Sudoku, Snakes and Ladders, The hidden picture & Book with questions. Download the most recent version here. Recently, Vasilis – maintainer of Game plugin is looking for support from Moodle community to continue the development of this awesome plugin.
Quizventure
Quizventure – Unique Moodle plugin which will stop your students from procrastinating while attempting the course quiz. The questions from the course comes down in the form of the ship and the students have to shoot the correct answers. Quite engaging and interesting plugin for engaging the learners. Download the latest version here.
Stash
Stash – Hide the treasure in your course and let the students unlock it. The teacher can create items and then place them in activities and resources for students to find. Along with Stash availability plugin, you can also restrict the access to course content until the learners have collected stash item.
Canvas LMS: Rezzly, ScootPad
Rezzly (formerly 3D GameLab) helps build quests and track student activity, with the possibility of personalized learning and standard alignment, including common core. Current version and availability is unclear. A student trial is available upon sign-up here.
Catering the K-12 space, ScootPad provides adaptive learning and analytics for gamification classrooms, serving a reported 2 million students. It features coins, rewards, the works. Free tier available here.
Gamifying without extra tools?
An open “Gamification in the classroom” course by Canvas LMS gives some ideas that can be applied in any modern LMS. (If you don’t see the presentation, try opening it here.)
But perhaps the most popular implementation of gamification in Canvas, no addons needed, is documented in this extensive community post by Danny Childers from Pearl River Community College in Mississippi. He talks about building quests using nothing but the current structure of courses and pages, with the help of some image editing.
Similarly, the Blackboard community has a group for exchanges about gamification, without a focus or explicit mention of third-party tools, despite the name “Course Gamification Tools for Blackboard Learn.”
