How to motivate students in an online learning environment: A personal reflection – Larry Baum
Before considering this challenge directly, first think of a somewhat different issue: how to motivate employees. We are employees; what motivates us to work? Pay is important. Without it, most people would not work at their jobs.
But as employees, we also want things other than money. What do you like about your job? Helping individuals? Contributing to society? Solving intellectual challenges? Interacting with your colleagues?
Now think about what you would like your boss to do to help you feel satisfied in your job. Probably you would appreciate a supervisor who advocates to raise your pay. But you would likely also value a boss who gives you meaningful assignments that have potential to help people, and that are challenging to the point of stimulating your creativity and knowledge, but not beyond your abilities. Someone who introduces you to the materials, information, and people to help you accomplish the tasks, but does not micromanage you. A person who listens to your views, offers constructive criticism, and appreciates your contributions.
Motivation is not necessarily all positive. Fears of criticism, loss of respect, negative reviews, or firing also motivate employees.
Many of the things that motivate employees also motivate students. Grades are the equivalent of pay as a major motivating factor. As a teacher, if you want students to do a task, it is generally good to assess it.
What else motivates students? Having fun, interacting with other students, learning interesting and relevant things, and solving intellectual challenges.
In CCGL9042, The Evolution of Civilization, which I teach with the tutor, Dr. Jack Tsao, we created simple, interactive games to let students experience concepts we teach. To illustrate comparative advantage, we split a tutorial into four countries assigned different rates at which they can harvest fish or bananas, then we require countries to decide how to divide their time to yield a balanced diet of equal numbers of fish and bananas. We run this game first without trade to illustrate the inefficiency of self-sufficiency, and then with trade to show mutual benefit due to comparative advantage. Next we adjust the abilities of the countries, with two investing in their strength to specialize and further profit from trade, and two investing in their weakness to ensure self-sufficiency in case trade is cut off. We then again run the game without trade, then with trade. Because this game is simple to grasp and fun to play, students actively discuss within and between their countries. After each of the four scenarios, we discuss and compare with real-world examples.
To explore the tragedy of the commons, in which a free resource tends to be used up, we split each tutorial into four poor villages allowed to profit by logging an ungoverned, slow-growing forest. Villagers may re-invest their profits annually to buy more saws and cut more trees. Each year, we have the students return to their villages to discuss among themselves and decide what to do. We allow them to negotiate with other villages but don’t require it. In about a third of tutorials, villages agree to a sustainable rate of logging, but other tutorials cut every tree. We then discuss examples, such as overfishing or air pollution, and ways to prevent them.
The things that motivate learning online are the same things that motivate learning offline. But there are some differences in the ways to implement them. For example, we motivate students to keep up with the reading and lectures by quizzing students weekly. I used to give the quizzes on paper, but now we give them on Moodle in the middle of lecture time, which allows students to take quizzes remotely.
A drawback is that students may look up information during the quiz or contact other students to share answers. To deal with the first problem, we make quizzes open book so that all students have a level playing field. For the second problem, we built up a database of questions from which Moodle chooses questions randomly. Each student gets a different subset of questions, with answer choices in different orders, making it harder to share answers. To collect enough questions to make this feasible, we reuse questions from past years, and we give students extra participation credit if they submit suggested questions for future semesters. To further reduce sharing of answers among students, I make the quiz navigation method (under Layout) sequential, so that students cannot return to previous questions once they have seen them.
I used to require a final presentation of a poster. To save paper and printing costs, we switched to recorded PowerPoint presentations, which are feasible for online teaching. We grade these to motivate students.
We limit tutorials to about a dozen students to create an atmosphere conducive to participation. However, even in such small groups, getting students to join discussions is a challenge. We grade participation, which leads most students to contribute. We keep a spreadsheet of students’ names, and during discussions we give one point to students who give single-word answers to questions, two points for longer answers, and three or four points for insightful answers or new questions. If students talk simultaneously online, we ask them to show the hand icon. We try to call on students who have spoken less than their classmates. This works well to induce participation, but a few students still won’t speak much, so after a few sessions, we email those students to remind them that participation is graded, to urge them to try to speak more, and to ask them to email us if they want us to call on them specifically with questions to prompt them to speak.
Keeping in mind what motivates you will help you motivate your students. Whether teaching online or face-to-face, motivating students is a challenge. But it is also an opportunity to develop new strategies and stretch our limits.
Note
The author is happy to share more details of the games and approaches described in this article. If you want to know more, please contact Dr. Larry Baum at lwbaum@hku.hk
