Course Overview

The course focuses on ideas that will enable educators to create interactions for a variety of educational strategies to support student motivation and learning across different contexts in online environments. Covering theoretical principles with accompanying suggested pedagogical strategies/activities, the course provides practical and innovative ideas for creating active and engaging online learning environments to enhance student motivation to learn. The course is designed for educators and learning facilitators/trainers in general — for example, in-service and/or pre-service educators — from varied backgrounds and levels of experience, intending to further develop their online teaching and learning skills and understanding. Course participants will be introduced to the range of learning opportunities on the Web and will be encouraged to consider how they could personally use and apply various technology tools and web resources effectively in their practice.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course, you are expected to be able to:

  • understand the online motivation and learning theories underpinning the TEC-VARIETY framework
  • recognize the issues and challenges faced by online learners and educators
  • identify the ten principles of motivation in the TEC-VARIETY framework
  • use the framework to develop strategies for mitigating challenges affecting online educators and online learners
  • discover the different pedagogical strategies associated with each of the ten principles, to create more engaging online teaching and learning environments
Syllabus

Topics covered

  • Module 1: Introduction and theoretical underpinnings
  • Module 2: Supporting online learners and educators
  • Module 3: Engaging online learners through the principles of tone, encouragement and curiosity (TEC)
  • Module 4: Engaging online learners through the principles of variety, autonomy and relevance (VAR)
  • Module 5: Engaging online learners through the principles of interactivity and engagement (IE) 
  • Module 6: Engaging online learners through the principles of tension and yielding products (TY)