Engaging the Learner: How Can the Flow Experience Support E-learning?

This paper describes research into making e-learning activities motivating and engaging, yet still producing effective learning. Flow is used as an underlying theory to explore student behaviour during online instruction. In this study, 59 students worked through a learning exercise in physics while two different methods were employed to measure flow experiences. Graphical visualisations (‘flow path’ plots) were employed to show the dynamic nature of the students’ experiences. These were found to be inconsistent with other traditional flow measurement techniques. The study identified the students’ changing focus between task and artefact as a contributor to this inconsistency. A significant contribution of this paper is the identification of ‘task-flow’ and ‘artefact-flow’ and their significance in e-learning.

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