Building Student Motivation in a ‘Suddenly Digital’ World
In a perfect world, students in Higher Education would come to class, online or physical, already imbued with high levels of intrinsic motivation.
No longer in compulsory education, students who enrol in HE courses are there of their own volition, often at very high financial cost, so motivation ought to be a given.
Of course, the world is rarely so simple; motivation is influenced by multiple factors – not least the fact that within any given discipline there are likely to be topics and modules that students naturally enjoy more or less than others.
A budding entrepreneur, for example, may be passionate about strategic marketing and consumer psychology but far less enthusiastic about sales funnels and statistical analysis, or vice versa. Even the driver of needing to pass exams might not be enough to coax them into working hard.
Additionally, when the world around us has suddenly been transformed and all learning has moved—at the flick of a switch—to remote in its setting, motivation can be hard to keep: the distractions are plenty and the lack of routine is felt by all.
While traditionally in Higher Education (HE) the responsibility for finding that motivation has rested primarily with the student, now more than ever it needs to be a combined effort: students and faculty need to work together to keep learning momentum and motivation going in a ‘Suddenly Digital’ learning environment.
A great example of this partnership comes from the instructor in the Netherlands, Professor Bo van der Rhee. Bo teaches Statistics at Nyenrode University in the Netherlands and became the head of department six years ago. He has been working alongside his students for the entire duration, to build an online course that has student motivation at its core. A key figure in the university’s Center for Marketing & Supply Chain Managementand ‘quantitatively inclined’ himself, he’s the first to admit that his course is not always a favourite among students.
“If students have no interest and fail to engage, then they fail to learn, and as they fail to learn and fall further behind, motivation drops further… and so the cycle continues.”
The challenge to engage those students was multi-fold and very relevant to the situation we now find ourselves in. So, we set Bo out to find out some solutions to the following questions that anyone could implement
- How could you make the course interesting in creative ways?
- How could you ensure students had plenty of opportunities for practice and consolidation so that they wouldn’t fall incrementally behind?
- How could you ensure that everystudent – in a cohort that may number into the hundreds – received sufficient feedback and guidance that they wouldn’t hit a roadblock and simply grind to a halt?
- How could you get students more involved and give them a sense of control over their learning?
- How could you incentivise them to do more outside of class?
After extensive product research, van der Rhee settled on McGraw Hill’s Connect platform as a way of offering his students a more productive and impactful homework experience. It was digital – and so appealing to today’s digital natives and accessible from anywhere; it was interactive and adaptive in a way that traditional textbooks are not. It offered motivated students the opportunity to really take agency over their learning. And it provided a way for teachers to assess where struggling students could be more successful through granular reports.
But, why digital? What is wrong with a physical textbook?
When Professor van der Rhee first arrived at the university, the Statistics course was taught using a textbook with no supplementary materials, and no system to allow students to practise at home beyond answering questions from the textbook which they could self-mark using the answers at the back. This was something of a blunt tool, since if students had answered incorrectly there was no feedback or further explanation as to the why. As a result, the Professor found himself receiving hundreds of emails from students every week, and while – as a conscientious teacher – he endeavoured to respond to them, the situation was unsustainable.
Connect, on the other hand, acts as a virtual teaching assistant with a help function and reminders of theory to help students if they get stuck. This led to an instant reduction in the volume of emails that he was receiving, helping those students who engaged with the homework to keep moving forward between lessons. What’s more, the analytics in the software enabled him to see what students were struggling with – information which he could feed back into his teaching for subsequent classes.
But he felt that there was potential to do much more with Connect, in order to further engage – and even enthuse – his students with statistics. Over time, he decided to ‘flip’ the course, so that students learn the theory from video tutorials before attending class, which enabled the crucial face-to-face time to be spent on clearing up misunderstandings, looking deeper into the material, and applying theory in realistic practice questions or scenarios. Connect became a core part of in-class work, allowing students to work collaboratively on problems and discuss them with the Professor and each other. Further work in Connect was then set as homework to ensure that students could consolidate learning and apply it independently.
Yet the analytics showed that not everyone was logging on. With several years’ worth of data on student performance and student practice in Connect, van der Rhee decided to some analysis to determine if there was a discernible correlation between engagement and success. What, after all, is more motivating than knowing that something works; that a + b = c?
The results were conclusive and very interesting. To find out more about the research, and the way in which Professor van der Rhee is using it to motivate his students, we would love for you to explore the paper here.
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