Can educational systems help in motivating students?

This undergraduate project is part of a larger project. The aim of this larger project is to design, develop and evaluate a mechanism that identifies motivational preferences of learners and then accommodates these preferences by providing each learner with motivational techniques that best support his/her learning process.

The first step towards providing personalization based on motivation in learning systems is to develop a framework of motivational techniques that can be easily integrated into learning systems. Such a framework has been developed and suggests a set of motivational techniques that facilitate the enhancement of motivation in online courses. These techniques are domain and course independent, making the framework easily applicable to different systems and courses.

The next steps in this larger project is the implementation of these techniques as well as the design, implementation and evaluation of an approach to observe the log data and performance data of students related to the respective techniques. In addition, a mechanism will be developed that intelligently assists with the analysis of the usage of these techniques by learners with different characteristics, learning progress and performance. Based on the results of such analysis, an algorithm will be developed that dynamically identifies individual preferences for motivational techniques and a mechanism will be designed that presents learners with the respective techniques.
The undergraduate student will be working in the larger project on a particular project task, helping to achieve the goals of the larger project. For example, tasks can include the design and implementation of a motivational technique or the creation of an algorithm that identifies individual preferences for motivational techniques. Another task could be the development of an approach to identify learning strategies and investigating the relation between learning strategies and the use of motivational techniques.

Faculty Supervisor:

Sabine Graf

Student:

Gregory Gomez Blas

Partner:

Discipline:

Education

Sector:

University:

Athabasca University

Program:

Globalink