eLearning: What's My Motivation?

by AJ Walther

Motivating a dog is easy. There is absolutely nothing my dog won't do for a treat. But motivating a human? Particularly an adult human? That's a complex process. If something (like, say, training) doesn't have an immediate payoff, how do we motivate adults to participate? If we want them to participate in their free time, are we looking at an insurmountable task?

I recently ran across an article on the CommLab India blog by Aruna Vayuvegula on Motivational Factors to Consider in eLearning and LMS Design. Vayuvegula referenced a paper called Worker Motivation in Crowdsourcing by Nicolas Kaufmann, Thimo Schulze, and Daniel Viet. I don't want to reinvent the wheel too much here by rehashing the parallels Vayuvegula pulled from the crowdsourcing study to apply to eLearning, but both the blog post and the study are pretty good reads if you'd like to dive in a bit further. What I did want to share, however, is a chart from the study outlining workers' motivations in crowdsourcing. (You can click the image to see a larger view.)

Used with permission from Kaufmann et al. (2011), Worker Motivation in Crowdsourcing

The motivational factors post by Vayuvegula goes so far as to give examples of how to tweak eLearning to apply to the different intrinsic and extrinsic motivators listed above. It also inspired me to look into what others in the eLearning field had to say about learning motivation. In doing so, I found a great post from Connie Malamed from a few years ago on Motivating the Instructional Designer (hey, sometimes we're the ones who need the motivation!) Are you tasked with motivating adults in your learning? What's your secret?

Here are some of my own previous articles on motivation:

• eLearning & Gamification: The Octalysis Framework
• eLearning & Gamification: Apply the Octalysis Framework to Your Training

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Comments

[Aohanian]

Thanks for this insight into learner motivation. One key point to remember about motivation is this: we don’t control most learners’ motivation. In fact peoples learning motivation in fact largely determined by their managers and by their peers. Achieving successful elearning is therefore as much about getting these people on board as it is about good content design.

[Jeff Walter]

Engaging the learner is the hardest part of teaching. Thanks for the links.