I am participating to a course on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with the intent of finding new ways of motivating students to engage in their learning process. Here, for students I mean the more general category of people that commit to some training endeavour, including both academy and industry. As a matter of fact, a quite widespread problem with training is keeping students engaged in pursuing their studies. This is not a recent issue, it is enough to consider that many of the teaching and learning theories about learning styles have been investigated as a need of understanding why some students performed much better that others, regardless the topic and/or the teacher.

(Image found somewhere on the web)

I started reflecting more on my personal experiences as a “student”, my driving motivations and faced difficulties affecting my engagement. One conclusion I can surely make is that the engagement has effectively worked each time I was the donkey in the middle of the figure, i.e., I was convinced the task was feasible. On the contrary, difficult times always emerged when the goal appeared as too far or too hard. So, probably an optimal way of teaching would be to propose short-term objectives the students consider as feasible, and on the base of those build-up the whole learning process. Then, an interesting question will be to find the sweet spot among people with different experiences, backgrounds, and also diverse levels of self-motivations in accomplishing a certain learning path.