Positively motivating learning:
- Relevancy
- Clear, attainable goals
- Discussion
- Hands-on activity
- Group work (but not the kind where you are assigned to work outside of class with random classmates who aren’t invested in the project or don’t care about the assignment — students hate that)
It should go without saying that the best courses that motivate learning tend to include teachers who are enthusiastic about their material, easily approachable, and have clear expectations and guidelines for learner success from the outset. However, enthusiasm is not really enough to motivate most students to spend the time required to spend quality time learning the subject and leave the class with a deep understanding of the material. The best classes I have taken could probably be described as variants of the ‘flipped’ classroom — where students are expected to learn the basics of the material outside of class (e.g., reading textbooks, papers, or online tutorials), and to spend time in class discussing concepts, working on problem sets, or participating in some other type of hands-on activity. I attended a small liberal-arts university for my undergraduate, and many of my courses were structured this way, sometimes even where the students did much of the teaching. When traditional lectures were taught, professors often chose to include small vignettes related to the course material that would be interesting and relevant to the lives of college students (they took the time to know their audience). I may not remember many of the specific formulas or facts taught in those courses, but I do remember enjoying them, and I came away with a deeper understanding of how to think critically about problems, how to solve problems, and how to explain new concepts to others though writing or discussion — which is really what’s important. I can look up those formulas and figures quite easily if I have the need to use them. An upside is that these kinds of classes are also much more rewarding and more fun to teach!
Demotivating learning:
- too easy
- too hard
- no feedback
There are lots of good students who will do very poorly in a class and fail to actually learn much if the expectations are too low (i.e., the class is too easy). Conversely, classes that are unreasonably difficult, in which the teacher is unwilling or unable to alter their teaching style to help students catch up or to better fit the background of students in their classroom can also be extremely demotivating. Most students are learning more than one subject at a time, and may choose to place a lower priority on learning material for class that they feel is a lost cause. The classes that I liked best were challenging, but offered many opportunities for learner feedback and improvement along the way, so they never felt impossible.
The online classroom:
Teaching online is a unique challenge, because many traditional methods of motivating learning may not work as well or may be difficult. Other than short tutorials, I have never actually taken an entire course online, so I’m working on some assumptions and guesswork here. One challenge to online classes is that the work isn’t face-to-face, so although you can get the benefits of a ‘flipped’ classroom where students learn pieces of information on their own (i.e., texts or online tutorials), it would be much more difficult to effectively re-create the other half of the classroom where students and teacher work together ‘in-class’ to discuss and solve problems. Video and chat provide ways to have discussions, but it may be easy for students to ‘hide’ their unease with a subject or fail to get the feedback that they need to improve. Depending on the size of the online course, it may also be difficult to adequately determine the appropriate level of incoming students or to provide real-world examples with relevancy to all learners. Online classes do have a major benefit of allowing students to work at their own pace, to use creative methods and visuals to transmit concepts, and to have continuous feedback on course pace, interest, and difficulty along the way.
Including the reading, I spend about 1.5 hrs on this week’s task.