Motivating Factors

Instructor Enthusiasm

Having an enthusiastic instructor can a great help, especially in a class that otherwise has low value and/or other marks against it. In college I had a US history class at 8 AM and I am not a morning person. But the teacher showed up every morning dressed sharp and really excited to talk about history so I kept a positive attitude and gave it my best effort. I also had a series of engineering courses that met 5 days a week at 7 or 8 AM and I had a similarly enthusiastic instructor. I can hardly remember anything from those courses but I remember the instructors.

Building Real Things

I find making actual, working things is a good motivator. I get sick of doing toy examples or solving abstract problems. I want to finish courses with something neat I can point at. My college’s motto was “Learn by doing” so a lot of my engineering courses had this aspect. We built airplanes and rockets, worked with real engines, and made our own shop tools. We presented our senior group project to industry professionals. A lot of other classes didn’t have this, though. I’m thinking in particular of calculus. Calculus and differential equations were undoubtedly important to my major but taking the courses wouldn’t give you the impression they were useful for anything practical.

Demotivating Factors

Bored/Unprepared Instructors

An enthusiastic instructor can make a dry subject palatable but a professor who clearly finds teaching a bothersome chore can suck the joy out of anything. I had many of these in graduate school in particular. One instructor taught from old, barely legible overhead transparency sheets that he must have been using for a decade. This in 2005! He’s probably still using them. Another instructor just wrote equations onto the board from our textbook while mumbling in the direction of the blackboard. I could go on. If an instructor isn’t going to put any effort into a class why should I?

My grad school advisor, on the other hand, put ridiculous amounts of work into his lectures, making demonstruations and finding original sources and novel media. He barely slept he spent so much time on his lectures, even for 101 level courses. And he was a good advisor too. I have a ton of respect for him. (Some of my classmates were demotivated in my advisor’s graduate level class because they considered it too easy, but I think they had Stockholm Syndrome.)

Group Projects with Jerks

In my senior year of undergraduate I had a year-long design project. My entire class collaborated on a project to design a Venus lander mission from launch to orbit and touchdown. At first I was super excited because how cool is that? But the fun didn’t last. I was elected to a team leadership position and had a difficult time managing my team. Some of that was undoubtedly my fault but a large part of the problem was that I was becoming more and more demotivated as I had people ignore my advice or outright present my ideas as their own. That experience is largely why I didn’t pursue a career in engineering, I wasn’t up for another group experience like that.

Motivation Online

I’ve played with a few online learning widgets and I can definitely say that these motivating factors are at work. In courses I took with Udacity the instructors tried hard to make their videos engaging. These people are experts in their fields and I especially liked when they told related stories from their own experience. I remember in particular the Web Application Engineering class. It was taught by Steve Huffman, a cofounder of reddit, and he told a lot of stories about how he learned particular lessons while working on reddit and his other projects. In one of the videos he even went back to reddit and talked to one of their current engineers about how they do things now. And in the artificial intelligence class taught by Sebastian Thrun he would show videos from his own work in robotics and self driving cars and talk about how what he was teaching in class applied directly to robotics.

In the Udacity videos the instructors seem to be encouraged to talk in really natural ways. This conveyed their enthusiasm and allowed them to inject humor and I felt like I could connect with that. One of the things I disklike about Software Carpentry’s video content is how completely dry and robotic the voice overs are (no offense, Greg…).

Another plus for the Udacity courses is that they had me building real, working software. In the AI class I was solving admittedly small problems, but I was solving them by writing real, working code and using the same techniques that power Google’s self driving cars. After taking the course I could, probably, buy a hobby robot and actually write an AI for it. And in the web applications course I wrote several real web applications. They are still online at http://jiffyclub-cs253.appspot.com/ and I’m using the same skills in a project now. This contrasts with something like Code Academy where they try to teach web programming with javascript, but I just couldn’t stay with it because you’re never actually making something you can point at, just writing tiny code snippets.

The jerks show up online too. Udacity’s forums had a few of them. But they are easier to accept online since it’s pretty much a rule that if you construct a forum jerks will post on it.