I am a big fan of Coursera, an online education platform. I’ve taken several courses through the site and each one has been excellent. The instructors are respected in their field and they are from reputable colleges across the country. Best of all is that the courses are free, and you participate as much or little as you wish. You are in control of how much effort you put into the course. For some subjects I only listen to the lectures while I work on something else. Other subjects, I complete all of the additional readings, exercises, and tests.
A class that recently started on Coursera (so it isn’t too late to sign up and catch up) is on gamification. Gamification is popular in the training industry and should not be considered a passing phase. There are new developments, applications, and software involving it every day. It is also one of the more misunderstood and misused techniques in training and instructional design. Anyone interested in staying relevant in training and instructional design should learn how to effectively apply gamification assets in training, and what better way to do that than with a free course! (See https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification for course details and to sign up.)
Also, check out some of the software that is out there for creating gamification online modules to get an idea of what can be done and possibly how to apply it in your next elearning project. Here are a few that really impressed my at the ATD Techknowledge convention:
- KnowledgeGuru (theknowledgeguru.com)
- ZebraZapps (https://zebrazapps.com/)