Stimulating Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation in Online Learning: The Role of Mechanism Design

Abstract

In online learning, incentive design is critical to motivating users to complete learning tasks, a core objective of online learning platforms. Research on motivation change and how incentive designs influence learning outcomes by affecting intrinsic and extrinsic motivation respectively, however, is limited. Drawing upon goal theory, we argue that online learners, overall, are less motivated in the middle of an online learning task. Deadline is an incentive design closely related to learning process: when deadline is approaching, users are motivated intrinsically to learn more. Besides, the incentive design of leaderboard shows a significant extrinsic motivational effect, which is nonlinear and maximizes when the leaderboard could be reached with moderate level of effort. First, we use secondary data from foreign language word-memorization platform to depict users’ online learning process and to examine the two main incentive designs, i.e., deadline and leaderboard. The empirical results support our theoretical argument. Second, we conduct two online experiments on the two incentive designs respectively that not only establish causal relationships but also explore the underlying mechanisms of deadline and leaderboard. The deadline experiment validates the role of deadline in improving completion rates and finds the IT-enhanced daily reminder serves as a cue that leads to instant learning behavior but has no long-term effect on the completion rates. The leaderboard experiment validates the inverse U-shaped leaderboard effect and identifies the goal attainability as the underlying moderator. This study contributes to the literature on incentive designs in online learning and provides guidelines for other goal-involved online settings.