The first piece of data that I found interesting was related to challenges. I think the common perception is that in corporate training, it is easier to get what you need from a budgetary perspective. It is well known that most teachers are underpaid and school budgets are tight, and one of the Level Up Learning statistics stated that 41-44% of teachers (depending on if they were game users or not) thought budget was a barrier to introducing games. In 2018, 32% of talent developers saw budget as a challenge for them, and 49% cited budget concerns the year before. While it has dropped significantly in a year, it still falls around that 40% range that the teachers were in. Budget concerns span all environments, as traditionally education/training has been undervalued. There isn’t a multi-year comparison in Level Up Learning, but just in seeing the 17% drop in one year in Workplace Learning, I can’t imagine teachers feel the same way if they were re-surveyed. Problems, budgets, etc. are solved much faster in an ever changing workplace, whereas changes in the educational realm take much longer, so seeing this drop for talent developers makes me both happy for myself, and wishing for the teachers that their budget concerns could change as rapidly.
From the same two charts, the concern over time was interestingly very similar as well. As an instructional designer, I can relate to the 44% statistic that getting employees to make time is a challenge. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Meanwhile, 43-46% of teachers find the time it takes to play games in the classroom a barrier, considering how much knowledge needs to be covered in a day/week/semester. If you think about traditional learning in classrooms as the “work” of employees in the corporate world, talent developers and teachers are really facing similar concerns here. How do we fit in the training we want to give, be that games in the classroom or eLearnings in the workday, when plates of our learners are so full already?
While the above comparisons were a little bit of apples and oranges, I’d like to also offer some qualitative, anecdotal comparisons between challenges to game-based learning specifically raised in the Level Up Learning study and my own challenges implementing game-based learning in adult learning. Let’s again return to the “Greatest Barriers” chart shown below.
The last piece I’ll speak to from this chart is the “Lack of Administration Support” statistic. Seventeen percent of game-using teachers and non-game-using teachers alike see their administrations as not being supportive of games. I’m unsure of their reasoning from the study, whether administrators are against games fundamentally, or because of one of the other reasons listed above, but from my experience, I have felt “administration,” or rather leadership, resistance to game-based learning. Every leader I’ve heard from agrees that it’s a great idea, but when it comes down to time, budget, and implementation, this is where that support has, in the past, fallen short. I wonder if the support issue the teachers noted is similar: well-meaning administrators who fall short of meaningful support when the time comes. We as educators cannot be expected to push forward with industry-leading trends in either education and training alike, regardless of any other barriers we face, without the support of our leaders. Leaders need to recognize both the benefits of game-based learning, but also the challenges listed above so that they can help support us through those challenges to best support our learners, regardless of whether that’s children or adults.