… And Then You Wonder Why These Students Aren’t Motivated In Your Online Classroom — Part I
This article is part of a series on the pedagogy of effective online teaching and learning. In this part, I discuss the types of student motivations and the five essential elements of an all-engaging online lesson.
Robin’s Story
Robin felt betrayed, denuded. He was staring at the student survey his principal had sent him. Not one of the thirty odd students in his online Google Classroom had anything good to say about the hours and hours he had spent in constructing his online lessons. “I feel sleepy in his Google Meet,” one said. Another said, “I just log in at the start, set an alarm for 40 minutes, and go to sleep, because I know I won’t miss much.” No names. This was a brutally blunt anonymous survey. The principal was already waiting for an explanation from him and Robin’s brain was thumping loud in the echo chamber of his empty head.
Robin’s plight is typical of the hundreds of thousands of those who were thrust into this ‘involuntary’ online teaching this year without much training of what triggers a student’s motivation in a remotely taught lesson. No wonder, their teaching was more like throwing enough mud pies on a wall, hoping one might stick. If Robin’s district had trained him on how student motivations work online, he would have learnt that student motivations to learning fall into certain specific categories. It would have made it much easier for him to target those very motivations and throw only the mud pies that would stick.
What’s behind student motivations
He should have been told that students are only motivated to learn because they either want to
- meet the expectations of their parents or of the peers whose approval they care about – an extrinsic motivation
- achieve certain financial success that only their education can open the doors to – an extrinsic motivation
- prove it to their peers they are not failures – also an extrinsic motivation, or
- enjoy the process of acquiring new knowledge, the curiosity of learning new things, the exploration of the unknown – the intrinsic motivation factors.
Extrinsically motivated students require more interaction time in live synchronous sessions with their teacher, while the intrinsically motivated students only need their teacher for conceptual support and for a sounding board to brainstorm ideas. Intrinsically motivated students don’t put off their learning when they get stuck. They expand their search for solving problems on their own, since they are not afraid of failing in their initial search. Extrinsically motivated learners, on the other hand, are afraid of failing. They would immediately stop trying in the face of difficulty. They would give up as soon as they make a mistake and there is no ready help available to fix it. For such reluctant learners, the online learning loop lesson model could be helpful. In this model, an online lesson is followed by a variety of online assessments to give students a range of assessment choices. These assessments, in turn, are again followed by mini lessons embedded within the assessment feedback to further clarify the missing concepts in the original lesson. These mini lessons are once again followed by a second layer of assessments, and so on. These learning loops will be discussed at length separately in another article. For now, here is a Google Forms sample learning loop assessment.
Still, that doesn’t mean the students who are extrinsically motivated will always remain so. It can change.
Through constant sparks of incremental nudging and compassionate support, students can move from the inertia caused by the fear of failing to puttering along others on the road to confident learning.
This also does not mean teachers need to create a separate lesson for each motivation. They only require a different set of instructional strategies within a lesson.
Knowing these motivations will only prepare you to anticipate the kind of response you might get from your students, helping you keep your own frustrations in check in the face of their untoward behaviors.
The Five Elements of Motivating Lessons
A wall-to-wall motivating lesson incorporates these five elements,
- Relevance: Can the students visualize this lesson relating to their interests now, and not in some distant future? If it must be distant in the future, can I use virtual reality technologies to make them visualize as if they are already there? An example could be using Occulus Quest or any other VR headset to take students on a virtual field trip inside the human vascular system, just like the movie, Fantastic Voyage. By the way, the current VR technology is not last year’s dizzying sweating headsets. You should try the latest VR technology once again to understand its potential for interactive learning.
- Autonomy: Do I give my students a range of assignments, activities, or assessments to choose from? This autonomy should take care of the variety in learning preferences and learning difficulties of students. Examples of autonomy could be letting the students choose their own choices of assessments via audio or video recordings, simulations, illustrations etc. Hyperdocs lessons with a variety of external links could also provide a range of options for students to extend live synchronous lessons beyond Google Meet time.
- Challenge: The assigned tasks must be within an individual student’s proximal zone of difficulty and achievement. Not too easy, not too hard. Success must be visible. If success is not visible, it will trigger a fear of failure. Hence, quitting offers a quick way out for extrinsically motivated students.
- Mastery: Reasonable amount of practice must lead to success. A sense of competence leads to take up further challenges. Mastery can be encouraged by giving students opportunities for repeating and reciprocal teaching in live sessions. Create students-teaching-students segments during live lessons, or let them record interactive audio/video presentations using applications, like EdPuzzle or Camtasia.
- Feedback: Frequent and timely feedback leads to elevated levels of subsequent effort on a task. Using audio and video variety in teacher feedback on student assignments using Screencastify, Vocaroo, PollEverywhere, and Collaborative Whiteboards etc. can simultaneously incorporate interaction and motivation into otherwise delayed-response student submissions.
Subsequent articles in this series will detail how to use the technologies referenced above in this article.
Note: This article is part of a series of collections that makes the basis for Dr. H. M. Saleem’s LIVE Interactive Online Workshop series: The Best Practices For Effective Online Teaching and Learning. To know more about this workshop series and to register for the upcoming schedule, visit www.keynote180.com.
