Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

16 Getting ready for online study 
competitiveness. Students will have their own goals for marks, 
but they always want to do better than their peers or those who 
they see as like themselves. In those “olden days” when I was at 
university, students got their work back in their pigeonholes. 
We would gather around those post boxes on the days when 
assignments were due back to retrieve our work and look at the 
marks. “What did you get?” was a frequent question amongst 
friends. 
Online there is no joint collection of results. Students may get an 
individual email or notifcation. Tere is no chance to ask, “What 
did you get?” Tis means that an element of competition or re-
assurance is more difcult to obtain, which could impact upon 
motivation. From the initial stages of online education in the late 
1990s, the late educational psychologist, Professor Paul Pintrich 
from the University of Michigan, USA, established a clear link be-
tween student motivation and their success (Pintrich, 1999). 
It is difcult for online students to get motivated, though. In my 
small study of students who had transferred from traditional 
classroom teaching to online-only learning, half of them said that 
motivation was an issue. One student said, 
Te learning is missing the essential human contact that draws 
and keeps your attention, and knowing everything is recorded 
and can be watched at your leisure can make it hard to be mo-
tivated to complete a lecture on the day, meaning there becomes 
a large backlog of unwatched lectures and unfnished work. 
In traditional teaching, students will see their lecturers in the cof-
fee bar. Tey will bump into them in the corridors or encounter 
them at events around the campus. Tis gives them an opportu-
nity to ask questions or just pass the time of day. Such small con-
versations are frequently motivational for students. However, in 
the online distance learning world, such ad-hoc meetings do not 
occur, reducing the opportunity for motivation. Online students, 
therefore, need to be highly self-motivated. 

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