As our FLC group reflected on chapters 8 & 9 in Courageous Edventures by Jennie Magiera, we discussed motivation, gamification, student readiness for higher ed, student retention, and feedback.

PSU Berks faculty enjoy a wonderful partnership with our CTL/TLT staff and online textbook resources to help with course design. Some of the materials come to us “ready-made” from the publisher or we create them with Mary Ann in TLT. Even with savvy course materials, are the students engaged in the course work? Are they using the resources provided to them via Canvas?

Next, we talked at length about motivation. How do we help students to be intrinsically motivated? When you have one third of class – high performers, the middle third – doing some of the work and the last third – not caring. Moving the lower two thirds up is a challenge. Teaching to the middle, while encouraging critical thinking, is also a challenge.

Magiera suggests ideas such as anonymous digital badging or gamification. Many of our faculty are starting to incorporate these activities into coursework to help with motivation. The research shows that student choice and autonomy help to create a more engaged classroom. Integrating student choice and interest is a delicate balance for faculty. Maybe bingo boards or friendly competition are the key to keeping students engaged and motivated. Knowing that student autonomy leads to a more engaged classroom and motivates student seems like a great idea in practice. It may work in a senior level class were students are developing assignments and the rubrics but may not work in a gen ed course with 50 students. The question for faculty is how to manage the assignment and give students breathing room to flourish.

Most of the faculty in our group are teaching gen eds, which presents its own challenges. For first year students coming into the fall semester, they are unprepared for the new course delivery systems (ie. Canvas), work load, lack study skills and time management skills. Do we need to adapt the course management to support student success in that fall term vs spring students? Possibly.

One idea that we did consider is thinking about our students as our “critical friends.”  Checking- in with our students, either mid-semester or at the end of semester, to get feedback. Often, we see more helpful feedback in the middle than at the end.