Story Board Assignment

Despite some rather harrowing difficulties with my internet provider - their equipment had a failure at MY apartment - I have my Story Board initally done. It will go through many revisions, I'm sure.


Story Board
For
Adult Motivation Video

Introduction:

I am pleased to introduce the keynote speaker for our Distance Education Conference, Dr. Leslie Moller. He is an advocate of DE and has published many articles concerning this topic.

Surrounding this particular concern are many issues as to just why and how adult learners are motivated:

Opening

Many researchers have attempted to narrow the cause of potential drop-out students, and how they may have been motivated to continue within their chosen degree. In today’s social venue, there are many Adult students who, for various reasons want to return to education. The focus on Adult DE envelopes the studies made within the past 5 years (2005-2010).
Motivation involves:

Volition: Defined most recently, as “the ability to stay task-focused and ward off distractions” (Deimann et al, 2010).
Instructor immediacy and presence
Collaborative construction of knowledge (Learning Communities) (Huett, et al, 2007)
Family (and peer) support.
Volition: The “Will as a Steersman”

Selective attention, “protective function of volition” (Kuhl, 1984, p. 126)
Encoding control: facilitates the protective function of volition.
Emotion control: managing emotional states
(i.e. sadness as a competing intention at suppressing volition)
Motivation control: maintaining and establishing saliency of current intention
Environmental control: free from uncontrollable distractions
Parsimonious information processing: knowing when to stop
There is empirical evidence indicating that the use of volitional strategies is related to decreased delay of gratification increased effort and better time and study.



Instructor Immediacy and Presence:

Affective Learning
Cognition
Motivation

Instructor Immediacy: Interaction is at the heart of the learning experience and is widely cited as a defining characteristic of successful learning in both traditional and online learning environments (Picciano, 2002; Swan, 2002; Wanstreet, 2006).

“it is credited as a catalyst for influencing student motivation, active learning and participation among students, and the achievement of learning outcomes” (Du, Havard, & Li, 2005; Lam, Cheng, & McNaught, 2005; Sargeant, Curran, allen, Jarvis-Selinger, & Ho, 2006; Tu, 2005)

Moore’s transactional distance theory states: “the quality of teaching and interactions among students and instructor relates less to geographical separation and more to the structure of a course and the interactions that take place within it.” (Moore, 1973; Moore & Kearsley, 1996).

Communication Immediacy: a concept proposed by Mehrabian (1971) refers to physical and verbal behaviors that reduce the psychological and physical distance between individuals.

Nonverbal immediacy behaviors include physical behaviors (e.g. leaning forward, touching another, looking at another’s eyes etc.)


Instructor Presence

An emerging research area for the field of online learning is instructor presence, or virtual “visibility” of the instructor as perceived by the learner.

Social Presence is described as the feeling that the group members communicate with people instead of impersonal objects.
As communication channels are restricted, social presence decreases within a group. (Short, Williams & Christie, 1976).

Although initial investigations of instructor immediacy and presence have shown promise, further research is needed to substantiate its importance in online learning environments.
Learning Communities

Motivation is a critical component to learning (Keller, 1979a, 1987a, 1987b; Means, Jonassen, & Dwyer, 1997; Moller, 1993; Song & Keller, 2001).

The research is strong in regarding motivation as critical in learning contexts. Bandura (1969) and Gagne (1985) argued that learning and motivation were a result not just of the environment (external) or the individual’s free will (internal) but a combination of the two. And, Keller (1983) stated motivation provides the impetus to learn and to achieve one’s ambitions and can be seen as “the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid and the degree of effort they will exert in that respect.”

Collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotians ofen results in greater understanding. (Jonassen, Mayers & McAleese, 1993)

Traditional DE models emphasize the independence of the learner and the privatization of learning (Keegan, 1986); however, newer models emphasize collaboration (Huett, Moller, Harvey and Engstrom, 2007).

And, in 1995 a Texas A&M study found a distance course which required students to work together improved learning outcomes and strengthened ties between students (Huett et al, 2007).