What's in it for me? The stick and the carrot as tools for developing academic communities

Abstract

Motivating students to contribute to learning communities is not a new problem, nor is it restricted to online learning. However it becomes especially obvious in large online courses where student collaboration is one of the intended learning outcomes. This paper describes two models for driving student engagement in producing user-generated and user-reviewed content. It discusses the motivation for participation and gives results from two subject areas. The behaviour of students of second and third level language courses is compared to that of first level technology students when their participation is simply encouraged and when it is required for assessment. A model for driving user-engagement is proposed and related to previous experience in online learning.

Keywords

• User-Generated Content
• Online Learning
• Web-Based Resources
• Pedagogy
• Student Learning Communities