Sam Geuter is the first foreign guest writer on my site. I am very happy to introduce him to you through an interesting post he wrote especially for gamifier.com.

It is no coincidence that my site is in English (which is much harder for me to maintain). The whole point is to get opinions from abroad, so I am excited and happy that Sam stepped up and shared his thoughts. In return I will do the same for him, just give me a couple of days.

How Gamification could transform Education

The state of education in Europe at the moment is pretty bleak and change is needed. Governments are making cuts left right and centre, forcing universities to adopt new strategies to generate income. According to statistics published by Time Magazine, Latvia has halved public funding for higher education since 2008, and Poland, Hungary and Estonia have all made cuts of between 4% and 7%. Britain has cut some university budgets by as much as 14%, and Italian and Spanish schools are having to suffer cuts of around 10%.

So now that Europe’s educational institutions cannot rely so heavily on government funding it’s becoming increasingly crucial for them to function more as a business, in order to be able to keep the fees low enough to allow poorer students to attend. This means developing a sustainable business plan. There are five ways in which gamification can help in the development of a more sustainable education system.

1. Fundraising. This is becoming more and more important for universities, and most do it in one way or another already. But the power of gamification in this context lies in its capacity to allow fundraisers to track their progress, set themselves targets and compete with their fellow ‘players’. From the alumnus’s point of view gamification can be used to award the biggest donors with public recognition. A fantastic example of this is the Stockholm School of Economics, which in a response to rising fees, used gamification in their fundraising strategy to increase participation by 300%, beating the alumni participation rate at Stanford.

2. A culture of collaboration. As most universities are at the moment, teaching is provided exclusively by the teachers, and little attention is paid to the amount that students could teach each other if they were motivated to collaborate. By concentrating on developing the intrinsic desire most people have to be valued in a community, universities would eliminate some of the need for teachers to teach the same thing over and over. A way of achieving this would be by creating forums within a university platform that rewards contributions from students and allows students to rate each other’s insight.

3. Engaged students. It’s a truism to say that gamification is king when it comes to engagement. By rewarding students for going to classes, helping out their friends and producing first class work, universities will contribute directly to the institution’s culture of collaboration and to the success of their students. And in the long term, students who are engaged in their studies and love their community will be much more willing to support the cause financially in years to come.

4. Insight into student behaviour. For years businesses have recognised the value of insight into consumer behaviour for the purposes of developing a sustainable and data-centric business strategy. So why don’t universities also adapt according to the needs and behaviours of their students? If universities are to diversify their revenue sources insight into what drives their students is absolutely essential. And gamification is one of the few tools that can give tangible insights into what motivates users. On top of that, institutions can then reward users for useful actions.

5. A more agile outlook. The notion of agility is very much connected with insight into student behaviour. If an institution is to take this insight seriously and act upon it, it must also work on being an agile institution that can respond to change quickly. As Ajaz Ahmed, Founder of AKQA says in his book Velocity, “good things happen to those who move”. What is meant by this is that to stay ahead of the game companies and institutions should not sit still for one minute, but should be adapting to changes in the market and the industry constantly.

So the crux of the issue is that educational institutions need to change their game. They can no longer count on government funding to allow them to follow the routines and procedures that they have followed for years or centuries in many cases. To stave off the onset of elitism due to rising fees universities are beginning to realise that they must be run as if they were a business. Gamification is a solution insofar as it can provide universities with actionable data, raise money and promote a culture of collaboration within the institution that will ensure it endures.

About the author

Sam Geuter is the Founder of Gamifeye, a blog and community about gamification as a business strategy.