On Motivation and Self-Regulation

Discussion Question from Dr. Barth-Cohen

Imagine you work in HR for a large company.  Your department has been tasked with implementing a new online system that will be used for tracking benefits and compensation. Many employees are apprehensive about the new system and across the company people have different levels of comfort with computers.  How will you design the training materials to help ease the transition? What challenges might you encounter?

Well, then, I was required to do this.  Well, not benefits and compensation.  Training on how to use tablets in classrooms.  There was no HR and we were in a remote town on the west coast of the Red Sea.  Most of my fellow employees, especially the instructors, were not just apprehensive.  They were openly, verbally hostile about new online systems as they sat coughing into their Turkish coffee in the smoking area.  

What I did was create brief YouTube tutorials: Quizlet, SimpleDifferent Website Builder, and Merriam Webster for Speech-to-Text

I got a number of visits to my YouTube channel from my colleagues.  Of course, as the saying goes, the old desert dogs did not want to learn new tricks.  Many of them said they simply couldn't.  Several of these gentlemen were in there sixties and lamented that the had no "tech savvy" or that all of this was just gadgety and teaching with tech was silly.  

I think one of the biggest challenges in motivating these gents was that the things they had been doing, for some of them, for forty years were still working.  They witnessed newer, younger teachers in their early twenties who were tech geeks, yet could not build rapport with college-age Saudi boys.  What do you do?  

I have tons of patience for my students.  And, of course, I considered those gents my students.  I would sit down with them in front of a computer, one-on-one, and walk them through the process.  I also would come and present the model in my colleagues classes, or invite them to observe my classes.  

At the end of the day, motivation has to come from inside, of course.  I think the adage about the horse refusing to drink is only partially true.  Young horses haven't been broken by the System and the Establishment, yet.  Young learners may refuse to drink from tech, but you can usually model it for them or have a fellow student model it for them, as in this video of one of my Saudi boys modeling pronunciation using the Merriam Webster app powered by the Google speech-to-text engine:

Once they witness its benefits, they usually buy in.

Digital immigrants (or whatever they might be called - guess they're not "immigrants" if they refuse to come over with us . . . maybe "digital aliens") are a much harder sell, generally.  Just a lot of coaxing and baby-stepping.  In my experience, though, they've already made up their minds that the water is poisoned and nothing on Earth is going to make them drink it.  

I'm very optimistic, still.