- Providing real world tasks.
In my second year as a graduate student I took a writing course. Not only did we cover useful fundamentals, the instructor made the tasks be directly applicable to what we were working on in our research. We spent time in class doing free-writing on whatever we chose, and our major course assignment was a draft of a grant that we all needed to do that semester anyways. As stressed-out early grad students having our writing assignments be developing work that was a priority anyways was really valuable, and made us all feel motivated.
- Belittling prior knowledge
Our graduate department is Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, so it brings together students with a range of backgrounds, including master’s in any one of these fields. To get all students in a cohort on the same page, all incoming students are required to take a full year “core course” covering all three topics. This chafed a bit for people who had done research in an area and didn’t care to take an intro lecture course in the subject, or weren’t interested in learning about the other disciplines (i.e. working on plants and taking behavior). One of the professors chose to attempt to convince students of the necessity of her ecology section by handing out a “prior knowledge” quiz on the first day, then discussing gaps in students knowledge with the class. This would have been a fine or OK teaching tool, were the questions on the quiz not absurdly specific/nit-picky random vocab, and of little interests to even the ecologists in the room, and her discussion of the class’s answers not superior and derisive. It set up a really antagonistic attitude in the room which continued throughout her section. I understand her motivation, she was tired of know-it-all first year grad students not wanting to learn about ecology, but the outcome of her tactics were directly contrary to her goals.
- Application to online
I find this question very interesting, because I have taken several online courses and have seen in myself a weirdly large drop in motivation, even for subjects I am interested in. I have come to think that there is something about the feeling of social responsibility to the person in the room with you, trying to teach you, that is lost. As an undergraduate we had huge lectures (1,200+ people) for our intro chem and bio courses. We didn’t fit in lecture hall, so they were videoconferenced to a room down the hall. It fascinated me that if you were in the videoconferenced room when the professor would make a joke you could hear through the mic everyone in the room with the professor laughing, and complete silence in the room you were in. The jokes were seldom funny, this laughter just seemed to indicate a sort of inter-personal responsibility that was lost in the few feet we were down the hall. If I am in a classroom with a lecturer, especially now that I have spent time teaching, I wouldn’t be so impolite as to obviously work on other things. Without that social contract, I start to multi-task and drift off.
But the loss of that responsibility aside, I think that making sure material is directly applicable to students’ other responsibilities is a great way to motivate, as is assessing prior knowledge without belittling, and those would work equally well online as in person.
With the reading and thinking and writing this probably took me 1.5 — 2 hours. Related to this weeks topic-I recently got the book in book form, whereas before I was reading it through our library online. Reading without my email and the whole internet a click away certainly helped my focus and made me read much faster!