The Impact of a Motivation Booster in Blended Learning Experiences in Computer Science Education

The outcomes presented in this paper are associated with the impact of motivational messages sent by a Motivation Booster to the students that participated in blended learning experiences. The aim of the Motivation Booster is to provide personalized and summarized feedback, by means of motivational messages, to the users of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning systems on their completed collaborative learning activities. The developed Motivation Booster was integrated into the Moodle system. Two blended learning experiences were put into practice at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana Montería (Colombia) over an academic year with students enrolled in the course called “Software Engineering” at the Computer Science Department. A group of students participated in the first blended learning experience, and they used the Moodle system without the Motivation Booster. And another group of students participated in the second blended learning experience, where they used Moodle with the developed Motivation Booster. The experimental results give us evidences that the students felt more motivated to work with the Moodle system when they received motivational messages due to the Motivation Booster. Especially students were stimulated to work in a group manner.