Why are online courses — which would seem to give students a lot of autonomy — so unmotivating?

I’ve been talking with students and faculty and staff about online classes and student motivation recently. It is not news that students taking online classes report significant motivational challenges — this has been known for more than a decade, and it showed up in various ways in my institution’s assessments of students during last Spring’s rapid transition — and it showed up pretty profoundly in a recent survey I did of first-year students in the Honors College. My colleague, motivation researcher Carol Sansone, was talking about this years ago and is in the midst of trying to understand the problem in more detail now — I’m really eager to see what she finds out, and what it might mean for how we design online courses.

A Motivation Paradox?

But all through the conversations I’ve had, I’ve been nagged by what struck me as an apparent paradox, based on my recollection of self-determination theory. In this framework, people are motivated to meet three essential, foundational psychological needs: A need for autonomy, a need for relatedness and connection, and a need for competence. People engage in actions to meet these needs, and may do so in ways that are driven by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are those that arise from the person’s own goals and values, and should also feed those basic psychological needs, while extrinsic motives are connected to rewards, punishments, and so on. Students approach coursework and college with a range of these motivations — and those motivations can vary from class to class and even from day to day within a class. Some or maybe alot of that motivational variation is related to things about the students and their circumstances in ways that are not immediately affected by faculty actions and choices around the class.

But faculty can help by helping students to tie the course related work to their own values and long-term goals, and by building classes that feed needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Academic classes, especially when they provide clear information about one’s performance, can feed that need for competence regardless of their format. Obviously, in-person classes may have an easier time feeding needs for connection — in a variety of small and subtle ways. Students report feeling loss of the ability to engage in small talk or just be present with one another while waiting for class to begin — and at least in our classes, don’t always engage in this way online even when faculty make the opportunity available by opening the classroom early on zoom. However, online classes would appear to maximize autonomy for students — and to do so more effectively when they are both online and asynchronous. Those are the online courses where you can do the work when it makes sense for you. And autonomy is fundamental to intrinsic motivation and plays a huge role in self-determination theory.

So I’ve been puzzling over this, until I read this interview about a new book on Relationship Rich Education, and it reminded me about an interpersonal theory (SASB) developed by Lorna Benjamin, a former colleague who has “retired” to consulting, and about one of Carol Sansone’s points about the relational nature of motivation for many (though not all) people. In Benjamin’s theory, which is rich and complex, interpersonal dynamics can be characterized on two dimensions and three “levels”. The dimensions are about being loving versus attacking, on the one hand, and being together or separated on the other hand. The levels refer to whether you are evaluating a behavior from another person in relation to you, from you in relation to someone else, and sort of “internal” to you — your behavior towards yourself.

An asynchronous online course means that I “free” a student to do as he or she pleases, and the student can operate separately from me — that is, I’m neither “loving” nor “attacking” the student — I am neutral on that dimension, and i’m on the unshared/not together end of the other dimension. But if we think about this, it is profoundly demotivating if teaching and learning are fundamentally relational acts. That is, online courses deliver autonomy at the expense of relatedness — students are “free” from my control and space, but this can feel like being ignored instead of being given autonomy. Now, my colleague Carol might rightly roll her eyes, but getting this little paradoxical thing resolved in my own headspace mattered to me. And in the end, I think that dividing autonomy, relatedness, and competence up into three separate things may be useful in the science, but it is not how people experience those needs, and when one need comes at the expense of the other, it may no longer be what it appears to be — autonomy isn’t autonomy, it’s just being ignored. So, why bother with thinking about this?

There are some important policy-related implications of thinking about online coursework and motivation in this more rich and nuanced way.

1. First, until we crack this nut, there is no way that ramping up our online offerings is going to be equivalent to in-person learning and instruction.
2. Second, and perhaps sadly for those who thought online was going to be a way to cut costs and get the same outcomes with lower investments, any way I can think of to crack this nut comes back to needing human beings in the picture. Human beings who need to be reasonably compensated and given the resources they need to do what is ultimately relational work.
3. Cracking this nut is going to require figuring out how to build relational elements into online courses in manageable ways. At present, online courses I have taught offer me the chance to build relationships with individual students, but students don’t build the peer bonds that they do when having in-person instruction. And, if I build relationships with individual students, my bandwidth is actually lower than when I teach in person. Many of my colleagues are reporting similar experiences.

Finally, all this has made me think that when students express challenges, difficulties, and dissatisfaction with online learning in this second pandemic-adapted semester — the idea that they “knew what they were getting into” and that faculty and institutions need not consider the issue is simply unreasonable. This idea implies that students had a choice. In most institutions, across most of their classes, they didn’t. The choice was, enroll and do a lot of things online, or don’t enroll. Not enrolling has consequences for financial aid, scholarships, and other supports that are critical for equitable degree completion. So, until we figure out how to create online offerings that enable relationships, and motivate students to log on and engage, and we have ensured that our online offerings do so — we need to have humility and think about how to help and protect students who, for no reason other than their birth dates and life trajectories, are going to be part of helping us figure out motivation in the online setting.