The Motivation of Gameplay or, the REAL 21 st century learning revolution

What motive – or motives – do our higher education students have for learning the material presented to or required of them? There is, of course, the pure joy of connecting with the ideas and material. Unfortunately, this happens much less frequently than many educators would like. More generally, students’ motives for learning are a mixture of intrinsic goals and extrinsic rewards, combined with psychological factors such as fear and need to please. If strong enough, these motives can and do pull students through to the end. We, at least, all “made it through” our own post-secondary schooling.