Motivation Techniques for Online Students

How to Gain Motivation

Decide what you’re trying to do in college. Find out exactly how you go about achieving what you want. (What classes are required? Equally important, what classes aren’t required? How long will it take you? How much will it cost?). With this information you can see the end of the tunnel. You can see yourself progressing, and you can avoid a lot of “wheel spinning.”

Identify negative motivators (negative thoughts, negative memories, negative visions, negative attitude towards succeeding). Begin re-programming negative inhibitors with positive ones.

Make college your job. Don’t let the incidental business of earning a living and leading a social life interfere with your central task of getting through school. If something must be neglected (and good planning can usually avoid this), then neglect something other than school. Your job is probably a short-term, dead-end proposition anyway. Don’t get bumped out of school just to work 48 hours a week for the minimum wage. If you pursue a continuous education, while it supposes to enhance your active career, try to align your study with your job activities, short-term, and long-term goals.

§ Real students own their own books, have a suitable place to work, and keep their materials conveniently available.

§ Most distractions come from within you. If you have trouble concentrating, try to see what’s bothering you and take steps to eliminate it. Most problems yield to direct action, but you must do the acting.

§ Assess your knowledge base in the area of your study and any gaps, strengths, and weaknesses you are already aware of.

§ Be Curious – get interested in the subject you’re studying. When you’re interested in the subject you’re studying, things become so much easier. You’ll be naturally motivated to learn and read about it. So how do we become interested in what we’re studying? We adopt a curious attitude. As long as you’re curious enough, anything can be interesting. Question it, use your imagination, get inside the subject, understand what makes it tick, find out how you can apply it in life, read real life case studies. There are many ways to make a subject interesting when you adopt a curious mindset.

§ Set short-range goals

§ Analyze your study task. What do you want to achieve? How can it best be done?

§ Set a definite time limit. You can get as much done in one hour as six if you know you must. Work expands to fit the time available.

§ Evaluate your success or failure. You can learn best from making mistakes, provided you recognize that they are mistakes.

§ Try to talk to other people about what you are learning in your online classes. This process is usually done with your classmates in a traditional school system but because of the nature of online education, you really do not have classmates in the traditional sense. What you can do is talk to family members and friends about what you have learned in your online classes. One other thing you can do is to try to arrange a chat with your instructor so that you can have some time to discuss the subjects and/or curriculum with him.

§ Try to be active in forums related to your course or classes. Even though there are no real physical ways of meeting fellow students in an online course most educational institutions that offer online education provide chatrooms or forums where you can chat with other people taking the same courses. These chatrooms or forums provide ample opportunity for different kinds of interactions with fellow students. You can use it to get to know other students personally and if you find one that lives near you, then you can probably arrange to meet with them regularly to discuss your subjects. You can set up online study groups, that other students who taking the same course can use.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/docs/motivation.doc

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/a7/33.pdf

http://www.edarticle.com/adult-education/online-education-and-the-challenge-of-motivation.html

http://www.pvc.maricopa.edu/~sheets/lmw/motiv.htm