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There is a lot of motivation theories. These generally postulate the importance of contextual factors enabling the representation a student may have about the future situation and the work he has to perform in order to acquire new knowledges and competences.

Following Viau’s theory (Viau, 1994), important factors are : understanding of future competences to be acquired, interest and value of the task, feeling about the control over the tasks to be done … All these feelings originate in the scenario and the context of the activities.  Learning effective activities are grounded in everyday and professional realities. The knowledge about the activities is important to develop a “security” feeling about the learning task.

› What can be done ?

•    Underline prior knowledge and “already there” competences
•    Clarify objectives
•    Illustrate and underline the importance of new knowledge and competences
•    Enlighten the context of use of knowledge
•    State precisely instructions and agendas
•    Comment over the interest and the value of the task
•    What are the degrees of freedom and the controllable part of the activities ?
•    What are the elements of interaction, feedback ?

Claroline tools like course description, Documents and links, announcements, agenda, learning path, home page of the course … are tools suitable for these purposes.

Activities

Quality learning don’t arise only from transmissive methods (transferring contents from books to students head). Not even from collaborative or interpersonal work ! It needs a personal “internal” work to assimilate new knowledge into earlier cognitive structure. Humans don’t learn online, they learn “per se”. So a most important part of learning is not embedded in the technological tool, nor only in the pedagogical setup. It’s necessary to give students tools in order to facilitate this intrapersonal work, to figure out the achieved task and the work still to be done, to assess the efficacy of the acquired knowledge.

› What can be done ?

•    Give a time scenario showing the different steps
•    Propose tools in order to work through informations (analysis grid, exercise, …)
•    Consider also activities out of the platform (library and Internet exist also outside the platform)
•    Be progressive, diversified and coherent over the different activities
•    Give tools (exercises mainly) in order to assess new knowledge
•    Alternate readings, exercises, problems, applications, cases
•    Give activities with the objective to produce or demonstrate something
•    Alternate individual (convergent) and collaborative (divergent) work

Claroline tools like course description, exercises, learning path, assignments, forums … are tools suitable for these purposes.