Don’t Hesitate, Motivate!

December 6, 2017

Students and teachers both can find it hard to motivate themselves in online courses. Distance learning lacks much of the stimulation that face-to-face courses have. No one laughs at your bad 90s references, there are no cuties to chat up before class (speaking for students, obviously), and there is no direct response to quick questions. The asynchronus nature of online courses and the busy schedule both students and teachers have makes it easy to send them to the end of the list of work. Therefore, online courses must adopt some aspects of design that keep students coming to the course.

Michelle Miller offers three major factors that encourage motivation:

  1. A sense of competency
  2. A communal experience
  3. Autonomy

Grades and Student Competency

These factors point to some surprising issues with motivating students. While a teacher might believe that the easiest way to encourage students to participate in class is to use the gradebook to motivate them, grades are not a major motivating factor. Relying too much on grades can have the effect of discouraging students. Making every aspect of the course a “high-stakes” graded assignment can cause undue stress for students and discourage their open participation. Students are not motivated by grades, instead they are motivated by their own sense of knowing the material. That does not mean that online courses should be easy or totally unstructured, rather instructors should design graded portions of the course to allow students to display their growing competence.

The first thing a teacher must do to help students gain competency is to ensure that the expectations of the course are lined out and well-understood by the students. The components of their grade should be defined and easy to understand. Having a complicated grading system with a ton of different features is confusing and might discourage students. A good way to ensure that students understand the expectations of the course is to assign a syllabus quiz. This has the extra advantage of fitting the second trick to encourage students: feedback.

Students will not gain a sense of competency if they never receive feedback. A low-stakes syllabus quiz offers likely positive feedback for a student right at the start of the course. Another simple way to provide more feedback is to break assignments into smaller bits. You can split a paper assignment into an outline, draft, and final paper. You can also design your quizzes so that students can have multiple attempts. Each graded experience gives the student a way to see their competency grow and learn what issues they need to resolve. Allowing multiple attempts on quizzes allows students to go through this process in an automated way. Feedback should be specifically geared towards the growth of competency. Both positive and negative feedback should point to specific decisions the student made that affected their grade. General feedback can just add to the confusion. Successful students might feel that they got a good grade by “bullshitting”, unsuccessful students might feel that they got a bad grade because you did not like their opinion.

Building a Social Experience

Among the factors Miller outlined, the most apparent difference between an online course and a face-to-face course is the difficulty creating a social or communal experience. Discussion threads in online courses just cannot compete with the experience of seeing, hearing, and chatting with people in a classroom. Even the stressful aspects of being in person can encourage motivation. Peer-pressure and shame can be powerful motivating factors. On a positive note, the fact that all those people are in one place sharing an experience is encouraging to everyone involved.

Ways to make online classes more social and personal have already been discussed in our page Making Online Courses More Personal. In short order, we discussed asking students to personalize their Carmen profiles (by adding a photo of themselves, for example), and making more “real-world” issues for discussion both in relation to the course itself or in a social space that is ungraded.

Course discussion can be designed to aid student involvement. One quick trick is to make the window for participation relatively narrow. If the discussion is open too long, procrastinators will be discouraged from posting in a stale conversation while studious posters might not want to be “first to the party.” By making a small timeframe, teachers can ensure that early posters don’t wait too long for a reply and late posters aren’t conversing with people who are long gone. One way to do this might ask students to write a post in a discussion in the first half of the week then reply to a post in the second half. In Carmen, you can facilitate this by selecting the option “Users Must Post Before Seeing Replies” for the first portion of the discussion. Splitting students into smaller discussion groups can further help keep discussion vibrant.

Discussions are also a place for you to give feedback to students. I responded to excellent discussion posts with a buckeye leaf sticker and a short explanation of what made the post good. Feedback not only helps grow competency, but can also be a social experience when it is done in the context of discussion.

 

Autonomy

People like a sense that they are in charge of their own destiny. Teachers should strive to ensure that a student in an online course will be able to make their way through the course with a minimal amount of confusion.

While online courses compare poorly to face-to-face in social aspects, they certainly allow students a large amount of autonomy. Because classes are asynchronous, teachers can offer students a range of assignments, materials, and due dates without worrying about the strict time constraints of a three-hour class.

Many instructors both in person and online give students a range of options for different assignments (multiple prompts for a paper, for example). Online courses can go a step further and give students optional material. I teach a class where students choose 10 out of 16 modules and one of two readings within each module. I call it “Make Your Own Western Civ Course.” Other instructors take a similar approach but have a main sequence of modules that all students are required to do and a minor sequence of modules they can chose to do as an option. Assignments for a course like this must necessarily be very broad (my paper prompt, for example, is “write a 1500 word essay in response to a discussion question”), but being able to pick their own material is rare for students.

If students understand the process by which they can receive a good grade and are given the freedom to work on items they find particularly interesting, they will be more motivated to participate. This also allows students to self-select into groups that are interested in smaller parts of the course and a better sense of community. You can make a discussion group for each “track” or individual module you make optional for your students to ensure that the same group sticks together by making a group in Carmen and selecting “Allow self sign-up.”

Assignments can also be designed with rolling due dates. Some classes offer five assignments each with different due dates but requires students pick three for full credit. This approach again allows students ownership of their experience while also allowing them to completely set their schedule. It can also spread the grading load for the instructor!

 

What does feedback look like in your classes? How do you give students a sense of autonomy?

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