Use Case: Motivation

Badges are a great tool for motivational purposes, but the first thing to ask yourself is what do you want to get out of them? There are 3 main use cases for motivational badges:

• Awarding participation
• Awarding Achievements
• Levelled Badges

Awarding participation

You can give learners badges for participating in something for the first time to encourage that behaviour.

For example, award a badge the first time learners post to a discussion, or login to the course. Key thing to remember here is that this use case can be used to introduce your learners to the concept of badging, and make it apparent that they can earn badges, however, awarding badges for simple things doesn’t work every time and should be used sparingly so they don’t lose their value.

Awarding Achievement

A large part of motivating people is rewarding them when they do well, so when a learner gets great results or hits a milestone in the course, give them a badge for it! You can also create incremental badges based on achievement of other badges; think “‘Release Quiz Master Badge’ if a learner receives 5 badges for over 80% in various quizzes”.

Levelled Badges

Taking the idea of awarding achievement a step further, you can create levels of badges for one activity. Depending on your score band in a quiz, you can get either gold, silver, or bronze badges. The idea here, is that those with bronze badges might be motivated to attempt the activity again in order to gain silver or gold.

Get some more information on these use cases in our community article on Game Mechanics.

Note:As much as badges can be used for motivation, you cannot talk about motivation without also looking at recognition, so we can look at how you can use badges for certification and micro-credentialing.