For the second part of our Week 3 blog, our intrepid course leaders have asked us to consider how we might motivate our learners. In some ways, for my project I might be a little luckier than most, in that this is not a required course, or a one-shot that students may feel “forced” to pay attention to, but rather optional, asynchronous online modules. So I think that at least some of the people who would be hypothetically viewing the modules would be intrinsically motivated. For example, there are a lot of libraries at Harvard that do face-to-face library instruction. I can imagine one audience for the modules being people who wanted to attend a F2F session but could not for scheduling reasons. Others might be non-native English speakers who want to view the module to review what they learned in a F2F session (something that seems to be a need for at least some of the libraries here). There might be other intrinsically motivated groups, too, for example students who are trying to get started in a project late at night or on a weekend and need some instruction outside of working hours (though I’m sure that never happens ;-p). I’m not quite sure what to do about learners who are not intrinsically motivated to use the modules. I don’t know if these will ever be required for any students groups (for example, to view before attending a F2F session), but if that happens, then we would also need to think about how to sell the usefulness of the modules to these groups.
Instead, what I think is the big motivational challenge is *keeping* learners engaged after they have started the module. Assuming we can drive people to the content, how do we keep them? I think that the ARCS model is potentially useful here. If we can capture their attention, I think the drop down menu I described in the previous post can help establish relevance. Potentially having some adaptive assessment programmed in, along with some feedback, can help establish learner’s confidence. As far as satisfaction, we can potentially also solicit feedback from the learners in order to find out how well they feel they learned from the modules, what they liked, etc (h/t to Erica for this idea in her comment on my previous post). A bonus of this would be being able to use this feedback to make changes if need be.
The other think I’ve been thinking about this week in relation to motivation is flow theory. This concept is also used in talking about game design, and as I mentioned in previous posts, I am interested in exploring how we can use education game design techniques to make research literacy modules. If we can help learners experience flow, and feel immersed in the content, then they will hopefully both learn and have a more satisfactory, and maybe even enjoyable, experience! I have actually signed up for this edX course to try to learn more about game design and how it can be applied in educational settings.
glad my comment was helpful!