Creating Low-cost Intrinsic Motivation Course Conversions in a Large Required Engineering Course

When attempting to create education reform, reformers often point to the unsupportive reward structures and significant time investments for training of faculty as two major impediments to change. In this paper, we present our efforts to minimize these “costs” and develop low-cost, intrinsic motivation course conversions. This intrinsic motivation course conversion aims to lower faculty costs and promote students’ intrinsic motivation to learn in order to create sustainable reform and life-long learners. We describe our design process to create such an IM course conversion, and present our evaluation of the conversion. The results indicate that we can create a shift towards intrinsically-motivated students who experience positive learning experiences at low cost to the faculty.

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