Motivating students at a distance: The case of an international audience

Distance education is rapidly becoming an increasingly important and even preferred method of instructional delivery for many educational contexts. In spite of the many student benefits surrounding distance learning programs, however, a great number of distance learning courses suffer from extremely low student completion rates when compared to their traditional classroom-based counterparts. Although it may be tempting to point to instructional content and methods as the source of low distance learning completion rates, it can be shown that it is often motivational problems, and not the instruction itself, which lay at the root of these statistics. This article describes the motivational issues encountered by a representative group of international distance education students, as well as a specific, low-cost motivational intervention that assisted the instructors of these students to improve completion rates by providing effective and efficient motivational student support.