MOOCs and Motivation

Personally, I haven't had much success with MOOCs or other online courses. By and large, my experience has been in line with Margaryan, Bianco, and Littlejohn's results, where the courses are characterized by their lack of authenticity or personal meaning/connection. For me, this translates to a short, unsatisfying experience because the original motivation that brought me to register for the course in the first place is often unsustainable in an inauthentic environment.

I was thinking about this idea of motivation with respect to some of the topics we've discussed earlier in the semester, including identity. If there is a 'different' identity (or identities) expressed when we're online, then does motivation exist differently online? Social capital, as well as the mechanisms for gaining or losing social capital, is transformed in online spaces, and it feels like this would change how and why we are motivated to do things. As a very over-simplified example, if we believe that online social capital can be earned through emphasizing certain characteristics or behaviors like being especially funny or witty, or using more pictures, emoticons, or memes—in short, if we believe our friends will like us more for having brief, visual, humorously interesting things to post to social media—then those same characteristics or behaviors probably ought to be more focused on in online educational spaces. If the nature or impetus of our online motivation is shifting because of social media, then MOOCs, being online, ought to wield that change more organically.