The Road Ahead: Marketplace and Gamification

As we approach the end of 2013 we leave some important milestones behind us, and get ready for an ambitious roadmap ahead.
Having passed through a rigorous testing and improvements phase throughout 2013, Talentlms is now by far the leaner infrastructure you can use to offer training. In this post I will outline some details about the most important things we will work on 2014. Use it as a sneak-peek of the things to come.

Take a look at our support portal and you can find things like, “more reports”, “build a joomla integration”, “offer a new notification when someone completes this or that”. We wholeheartedly invite you to share your idea or need; we will progressively implement things that make sense for many of you. A few times we might have to say no, to make sure that what is good for one won’t jeopardize the experience for the many. It never feels good to say no but sometimes it may be unavoidable.
We have our internal to-do list, as well. Usability, Speed and Security are always top priority. You know… optimizing those little things that count. They are moving targets though, with no perfect solution at sight. Persistence and attention to detail can get us closer though. A bit closer each and every time.
Despite those “little battles” we also concentrate on the road-ahead: the few important things that will make a positive difference to all of you. Those things may offer a gigantic leap on user-experience or a new world of possibilities altogether. We can’t concentrate on too many of those things at the same time. And Two seems to be a reasonable compromise.
Getting to the gist, the two main new things we will work on during 2014 are the Marketplace and the Gamification extensions.

Marketplace

Content is important. Without content an LMS is an empty box. No matter how beautiful it is, it has little value. Creating interesting content may be a really tedious job that needs domain expertise. Even worse, many times it can be a highly repetitive task. Businesses and users tend to have similar needs despite any localization factor. The mining industry in Australia has similar training needs on safety with the mining industry in the United States – and vice-versa.
Why not be able to re-use content directly created from others? Or sell your content to others? We aim to build a marketplace within of TalentLMS that will let you do exactly that: Buy and Sell courses. This will be a strictly B2B (Business-2-Business) marketplace. We will use premium content from 3rd party providers to populate it from day one. But you will be able to sell your own courses as well to other TalentLMS providers and businesses. Which in turn will be able to sell it to end-users or use it for internal training. Win-Win.

Gamification

Gamification is one of our favorite topics and we will extend this love during 2014.
Gamification is the use of game-based mechanics, aesthetics and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning and problem solving. Basically it’s the use of gaming technology to solve problems outside of the games sector.
We are already working on designing a sophisticated Gamification layer for TalentLMS. We’d like to hear from you on that front, and urge you to answer this survey.
Gamification can be perceived in different ways, but in our context we deal mostly with the gamification of the system itself. Things you can expect are Points, Leaderboards, Levels, Achievements, Badges and tighter social engagement. The main goal is to increase user Engagement, Loyalty and Fun together with a (hopefully) improved learning outcome.
We plan to offer amble opportunities for customization as well. What activities will give Points? How many points? What happens when someone reaches a certain level of Points? Want visibility of other’s Achievements or not? Want Badges or Not? What makes sense for others, may not make sense for you.

To wrap things up

We will keep you posted as we progress on the above two major upgrades during 2014. What is certain is that the road ahead will be an interesting one. And we want you to join us all along the ride.