The main purpose of the project is to address the problem of keeping students in online courses motivated and on task in their learning activities. The study seeks to assess the potential tradeoffs in on line courses between designs that motivate or enhance interest (e.g. related links; multiple pathways) and designs that enhance on-task or in-depth learning. It is critical for successful learning in online courses that students self regulate their learning activities, since they are no longer in a supervised classroom setting. The project builds on a model the PIs developed called Self-Regulation of Motivation. The issue for research is how students construct their own learning tasks in light of their need to both reach learning goals and experience interest. The project will involve a series of experimental studies to assess the various featues of a on-line course that lead to higher interest and learning.
The findings of the study have the potential to enhance on-line learning experience world wide regardless of academic discipline. Furthermore, on-line STEM instructors must develop courses that often involve multiple dimensions of knowledge (e.g., sensory experiences or experiments, a huge vocabulary to be learned/memorized, formalization of knowledge often involving abstract concepts). This embedded and complex learning of content knowledge requires that the orchestration of motivation and performance be known explicitly. The findings of the study have implications for design and delivery of online courses.
Online courses are becoming more common in higher education. The Sloan Consortium reports that 32% of students took an online course in 2012. With the recent appearance of massive open online courses (MOOCs), online learning is more important than ever. Much remains to be learned about how to structure online courses. There are two key aspects to this challenge. One aspect that has received lots of attention involves finding the best ways to make traditional course components—e.g. lectures, assignments—available online. The other aspect involves finding ways to motivate online students—e.g. to engage with the material, to stay on-task in the face of distractions, to maintain interest—with the goal of increasing persistence and learning. This aspect, which has received much less attention, is the focus of our research. We investigated the nature of motivation in online learning. For the first three studies, we created a small computer lab. Before arriving at the lab, volunteer students completed an online survey designed to measure background knowledge and attitudes. Upon arriving, students were seated at a computer and asked to spend 90 minutes working on an online lesson. The lesson taught how to create simple web pages in HTML, the presentation language of the Web. We unobtrusively monitored each student, with their consent. We recorded all of the web sites that students traversed; this told how much time was spent on different parts of the lesson and how much time was spent visiting unrelated web sites. Each lesson ended with a programming assignment. After 90 minutes, we administered a survey that contained a short quiz on HTML as well as questions concerning interest. Students were also able to request the access code to the entire associated online programming class, which reflected their likelihood of continued learning. First Study. We examined the effects of information designed to help students see learning HTML as useful in real life. Students were randomly assigned to read one of three different descriptions of the lesson before beginning. Group one read a technical and neutral description; group two read how the material would be useful at home; group three read how the material would be useful at work. Students from the second and third groups were more likely than those from the first group to experiment with examples of HTML coding. Further, the more students experimented, the higher their quiz scores and the greater their reported interest, and interest predicted requests for the access code to the entire class. However, greater experimentation was also associated with lower assignment scores, because students had less time to work on the assignment. Behaviors that reflect and create interest can thus be associated with both lower (assignment) and higher (quiz) performance, depending on the measure. These findings suggest that behaviors that seem to reflect poorer self-regulation while learning online may actually serve to regulate interest, with positive long-term effects on learning. The challenge then is to construct course structures that do not create unnecessary trade-offs between performance and motivation. Second study. We examined whether the perceived usefulness of learning HTML could be conveyed by using examples of mock personal or professional web pages throughout the lesson. Perceived usefulness was not successfully created through this means, and we are continuing to explore the data. Third study. We explored whether perceived usefulness had similar effects when students were concerned about performance evaluation. Like Study 1, we randomly assigned students to read either the neutral lesson description or the description which included how learning HTML could be useful in real life. Within each group, a subset of students further read that there would be a quiz, with grades compared to other students. Students who expected to take a graded quiz felt that it was more important to do well. These students also expected the lesson to be more difficult, especially when they had read about the usefulness of learning HTML. The more that students cared about doing well, the more interest they reported at lesson conclusion. In contrast, the more difficult students expected the lesson to be, the less interest they reported, and this was because they were less likely to have experimented with the examples. The challenge, then, is to find ways to add evaluation without interfering with the ways that students might make learning more interesting. Fourth study. We studied volunteer students who were enrolled in an actual online course in HTML and JavaScript programming. Half of the students read a message that emphasized how useful the topics in the class would be to them. Over the course of the semester, we recorded a variety of measurements designed to reveal how the students interacted with the course, including periodic popup surveys. Data collection was recently completed, and we have been working to combine the wealth of data and begin analyses.
