Theories of Motivation and Empowerment in Open, Distance, and Digital Education: Empowering Attributes, Contexts, and Experiences

Abstract

Motivation instigates and guides learning in open, distance, and digital education (ODDE). It is indispensable to distance learners’ engagement, persistence, and achievement. A lack of motivation is associated with perennial issues such as early dropout and poor performance in ODDE. This chapter provides an introduction to key theoretical perspectives on motivation, including sociocognitive theories, sociocultural theories, and the concept of perezhivanie. Each perspective provides a unique way for understanding and researching motivation in open and distance learning (ODL). Motivation is discussed as personal attributes internal to the distance learner from a sociocognitive perspective. Drawing attention to social processes and contextual influences, sociocultural theories situate motivation in relevant contexts and highlight motivation as a social, interactive, mediated, and evolving construct. The concept of perezhivanie gives prominence to distance learners’ learning experiences and subjective meanings they derived from personally significant experiences in ODL. This perspective pinpoints motivation that is experiential, reflective, and affect-laden. To advance the goal of empowering distance learners to engage and persist in ODL, these theoretical perspectives are important as they underscore empowerment derived from enabling personal attributes (sociocognitive theories), motivating contexts (sociocultural theories), and personally significant experiences (perezhivanie).