Session T2D 1-4244-1084-3/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE October 10 – 13, 2007, Milwaukee, WI 37 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T2D-1 Using Forums and Assessments as Motivational Tools in E-learning Courses: a Case Study Mario Muñoz Organero 1 , Carlos Delgado Kloos 2 1 Mario Muñoz, Telematics Engineering Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, munozm@it.uc3m.es 2 Carlos Delgado Kloos, Telematics Engineering Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, cdk@it.uc3m.es Abstract - The success or failure of e-learning courses depends not only on the design and quality of the learning materials but on the ability to motivate students to study them. Motivational factors are of the uppermost importance in e-learning courses since the motivational impact of the student-teacher proximity obtained in face- to-face education is normally not achievable. This paper makes an analysis about how to make use of some of the tools available in e-learning systems to try to motivate students. The paper makes a general review of the available tools and takes a special interest in forums and assessments. The results are validated based on the experience obtained from the teaching of the subject “Internet Society”. This subject is offered to the students of all the six public Universities in Madrid (Spain) using a Moodle based e-learning platform. The experience has studied the behaviour of 60 students and their reactions to several motivational stimuli based on forum participation and assessments. Index Terms – assessments, case study, forums, motivational factors in e-learning courses. INTRODUCTION Motivational factors are of the uppermost importance in e- learning courses due to the fact that they oriented to compensate the lack of traditional face-to-face interactions and to maximize the learning outcome of the process. Although the motivational impact of the student-teacher proximity obtained in face-to-face education is normally not achievable, the environment in which e-learning activities take place offers other interesting sources of motivation. This paper examines how to make the best use of two particular e- learning tools (forums and assessments) to motivate e- learners. Among the theories that describe motivational factors in training, one of the most successfully deployed is the ARCS theory, proposed by Keller [1]. According to this theory, there are four factors that influence and maintain students' motivation: attention, relevance, confidence, and success. Following this theory, Taran [2] proposes 10 techniques for capturing and sustaining students' attention while learning online. These techniques capture both perceptional and operational issues. In the same line, the Atgentive project [3] is designing attention driven e-learning platforms which try to motivate students by measuring their state of attention and providing some mechanisms to enhance it. Both [2] and [3] focus mainly on how to design and present contents in e- learning platforms so that the motivation (attention) of the student is captured and sustained. We take a tool-based complementary approach in this paper. We examine how to use two particular e-learning tools (forums and assessments) in order to maximize the students’ motivation. This approach complements previous studies related to the use of forums (such as in [6]) and assessments (like in [7]) in e-learning scenarios taking into account their motivational impact. Forums provide a guided collaborative environment in which knowledge can be built and shared. This paper presents some metrics that can be used to evaluate the quality of the messages posted by every student so that the activity in the forums can be marked. This paper also studies the correlation between the amount and periodicity of the guidance that the teacher introduces in the forum and the amount and quality of student messages. The relative percentage of the mark obtained by participating in forums with respect to the final mark is also analyzed. Assessments not only provide a way to measure the performance of students but can also be used proactively to motivate the study process. This paper makes an analysis about how different factors such as grades, time constrains and personalization, can have a positive or negative impact on student motivation. The results are validated based on the experience obtained from the teaching of the subject “Internet Society”. This subject is offered to the students of the six public Universities in Madrid (Spain) using a Moodle based e-learning platform. The experience has studied the behaviour of 60 students and their reactions to several motivational stimuli based on forum participation and assessments. The paper is divided into 5 sections. The first section, this one, contains an introduction of the paper motivating its reading and relevance. The second is dedicated to describe the scenario that we have used to carry out the experiments that study the different impact of several motivational factors related to the student participation in forums and assessments. The third section describes the mechanisms, experiments and results related to motivational factors in forums. The fourth section does the same for assessments. The final section captures some conclusions about the research experiences described in the paper.