Motivating
As an undergraduate student, I remember taking several particularly motivating classes that had the unique characteristics described below.
- The class included a very hefty (probably more than 2/3 of total time) amount of informal space for exploration and reflection. The instructor would give an overall topic area, and we were free to pursue subjects within this topic as we saw fit, using whatever resources we wanted. This amount of space was extremely refreshing, and I remember every student working quite hard, even though there was nobody directly looking over our shoulders. The final project for the class was a 15 minute presentation on our work, using any format that we chose. (This class was actually a two-week intensive field course that I took as a sophomore — I’m not sure that this format would be possible either in a traditional setting or an online classroom, as it relied heavily on us being a “captive audience”, away from campus and in the era before smart phones and easy access to the internet, without much to do other than explore our ideas.)
- An assignment in the class (usually a final project) had some “real world” implications — that is, it wasn’t created solely for our own learning, but could potentially turn into a project/finding/result that could be used by others. In my case, this was usually a class in which the instructor let us know at the beginning that several previous students had published papers (or written popular articles) based on the work that they did for the class. Similarly, one of my Ph.D. advisors has his undergraduate students break into groups and collect small data sets for a final project. These data would occasionally end up in papers published by the undergraduates, or by my advisor and his graduate students!
- I remember having an economics class with a Ph.D. student as a head instructor (rare at my undergraduate institution). It was very clear that the student was trying very hard to make the class a good one, and he was largely succeeding. Just seeing his level of effort in some ways made me feel compelled (in a good way) to “meet him half way” and work harder on the assignments.
Demotivating
In addition to the converse of any of the above experiences being demotivating, I can also remember a few specific instances in which I was really turned off by a class.
- Ironically, the worst experience I ever had in a class shared some characteristics with my favorite class (first item above). It was an introductory mechanical engineering class the focused heavily on design and creativity, and we were broken into small groups to complete three design challenges. The trouble was that I didn’t really “get it” right from the start — what the instructors were looking for, how to put together a work process that would get us to a successful end goal, etc. — and I never felt that I was taught how to improve. Our first project went very poorly, and the next two weren’t much better. I now chalk this up to almost too much flexibility, and the unwillingness of the instructors to give someone like me a clear path forward (even if it wasn’t the only one) so that I could achieve some success and go forward from there. This class actually single handedly stopped me from pursuing an undergrad degree in mechanical engineering.
- I’m sure that I’m not alone in saying that some of my worst classroom experiences were with lecturers who clearly did not care much about the material themselves, and who appeared to care even less about whether we were learning the material or not. The first higher level math class that I took in college was like this.
Online Classes
Personally, I think that my “stickiest” learning experiences as a student involved one-on-one, personal interaction with faculty members and other students (usually those older than me who could act as mentors). Certainly some of this can be replicated online, but in the same way that the best parts of conferences are always the coffee breaks, the best parts of my learning were at happy hours, informal lab meetings, sitting around before class started, etc. Something about sitting in front of a computer seems to make me always just want to get to the point and move on, which is in some ways the opposite of the relaxed informality that has been a part of my most best learning experiences.
Certainly, however, the suggestions about giving “real world” assignments and showing that you’re trying hard can probably be done online. So could both giving too little guidance (perhaps more of a danger online, as it’s difficult to “read” students without rich visual, auditory, etc. cues) and showing that you clearly don’t care.
A few years ago, I actually taught five classes in introductory biology and undergraduate ecology for the University of Phoenix, Online. I found my students to be overall very highly motivated, probably more so than the students that I taught (as a teaching assistant) in person. I presume that this is because many of them were returning students with clear extrinsic motivation — I would estimate that at least half of my students had families and were taking classes from home in order to get a degree to “get ahead” somehow. Plus, UoP is an extremely expensive school, so they had to be sure that they wanted to be there!
All together, I would estimate that I spent 1-1.5 hours on this week’s tasks, including the reading.