Introducing Achievements for WP Courseware!
Introducing Achievements for WP Courseware! Now you can incentivize your students for progress and performance within your courses...create badges, customize achievement point values, encourage competition with a leaderboard, and more!
Today we're excited to announce the introduction of a new feature package for WP Courseware with the addition of course Achievements!
We've been working on this update for several months and we're thrilled to finally make this update available to our loyal WP Courseware users.
Encourage Progress and Enhance Learning Retention
By now you’re likely familiar with the benefits of gamification in e-learning. A wide body of research has been published on the positive effects achieved by adding a little friendly competition into the classroom, regardless of age.
We’ll cover setup in just a moment, but WP Courseware’s Achievements functionality provides a great deal of flexibility with what you reward students for and how much you reward them.
The gamification aspects of your online course(s) can be simple or you can use your creativity to create elaborate reward structures.
Because you can create customized achievements for units, quizzes, surveys, and courses, you can structure different rewards paths by segmenting your content and student interactions.
By pairing the Achievements features with other WP Courseware functionality such as course prerequisites, you can truly take your learners on a journey through your content.
How does this help?
Reward Progress
One of the simplest ways to use gamification within an online course is to award points based on progress. This could come in the form of completing a lesson, completing a course, or completing multiple courses.
This is obviously a quantity-driven reward, so it’s a good idea to pair this reward structure with…
Reward Performance
…a quality-driven reward! We don’t want students rushing through courses to earn badges unless we’re doing our best to ensure learning retention.
With WP Courseware’s Achievements functionality, you can also reward students based on quiz performance. The functionality can be used on blocking and non-blocking quizzes, but also on surveys. This is a great way to incentivize feedback and it can be used in many different ways, from evaluation of your course to assessment of future product ideas.
Let’s Set Up Our Achievements!
1. First, we’ll head to WP Courseware’s main Settings screen, navigate to the Courses tab, and then to the Achievements submenu.
From here, we can:
- Specify our Leaderboard Page to display rankings (this page is created for you by default)
- Enable Popup Notifications to give students realtime notices of their rewards
- Choose how long the popup remains visible with Popup Time
- Choose a Popup Background Color and a Popup Text Color to match our site
2. Next, we’ll create our Achievements. The Achievements menu is accessed in the WordPress admin sidebar panel under WP Courseware.
Once you’re there, just click Add New as you would with posts or pages.
To create a new Achievement, we’ll add:
Achievement Title: This will be the name of the Achievement displayed when awarded.
Achievement Text: Here you can customize the subtext in the Achievement popup.
Achievement Details: You can configure each Achievement’s value here.
You can also customize the Achievement’s badge image by choosing from a badge in the default library or by uploading your own.
3. Now that we have our Achievements created, we’ll enable the Achievements functionality within our course.
We’ll navigate to WP Courseware’s Courses screen, choose our course, and in the Course Builder we’ll then navigate to Course Settings > Achievements.
If you would like to assign an Achievement for completing this course, you can choose that here also.
NOTE: If you are using Achievement popups, in order for them to display properly you’ll also want to navigate to Course Settings > General and set Unit Advancement to Manual. Otherwise, the student will be ushered to the next unit before the popup can be displayed.
4. With Achievements enabled for this course, we can now begin assigning other Achievements. First, we’ll assign an Achievement to a unit so that when a student completes this unit they’ll receive our Unit Completed Achievement.
Let’s head to WP Courseware’s Units screen (or access the unit from the Course Builder) and select our unit.
Inside our unit, we’ll use the Achievements metabox to select our Unit Completed Achievement from the dropdown menu.
5. Now we’re going to add an Achievement to one of our quizzes as well so that if a student passes the quiz, they’ll receive our Quiz Passed Achievement.
We’ll navigate to WP Courseware’s Quizzes screen (or access the quiz from the Course Builder) and select our quiz.
Inside our quiz, we’ll use the Achievements metabox to select our Quiz Passed Achievement from the dropdown menu.
And that’s it!
Now Let’s Take a Look at Achievements in Action!
Now that we have all of our Achievements configured, we can take a look at what happens when a student…
...completes a unit...
...passes a quiz...
...or completes an entire course!
We can also view our course’s Achievements Leaderboard from the frontend as a student…
…or on the backend in our WordPress admin dashboard.
Ready to Get Started Creating Your Own Achivements?
If you're an existing WP Courseware license holder, all you need to do is log into your WordPress admin dashboard, head to the Installed Plugins screen, and a WP Courseware update which includes the Achievements functionality will be waiting for you to install.
If you need to renew an expired WP Courseware license, you can do that by logging into our Member Portal, navigating to the License Keys tab, and then choose, Renew License.
Not an existing WP Courseware user? Well, what are you waiting for?! 🙂 Now is a great time to take advantage of 50% off sitewide as we celebrate the release of WP Courseware Achievements! See the banner at the top of our site to access the discount code.
Is it possible to have a quiz-based leaderboard based on the best score and time taken to finish the quiz?
Currently the leaderboard only takes total points earned by the student.