How can we enhance self-motivation in students taking non-mandatory courses?

Abstract

As a teacher, I am expected to engage in an interactive teaching style, engaging the students in varied learning activities, including class discussion facilitated by the use of the white board, group reflections, step-wise quizzes and think-pair-share discussions, and other various strategies promoting active learning (Holmes et al. 2015). The reasoning behind this shift in teaching style is grounded in new insights into learning outcomes in the field of pedagogy, showing that students learn more when actively engaged during the teaching sessions. In January 2018, I started in a new position as an associate professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Bergen. Since the start, I have engaged in new courses as course leader every semester. Motivated by the wish to bring more students into the teaching room and take part in non-mandatory teaching, I re-designed one of the courses, based on various tenets predicting that this would make the students come to teaching sessions and learn more. The very skeletal empirical data show that less students signed up, but the ones who did, were more motivated and presumably learned more.