Motivation in Web Based Learning - Lessons Learned from Volunteer Web Communities

Millions of people devote substantial amounts of their time and energy to collaborative user-generated content projects. In these open web communities the task itself and how a person feels about It are important motivation factors. In student motivation studies the main interest has been in other motivation dimensions like importance and effort. In this paper we suggest an extended method to measure student motivation which covers also the affect dimension. The results of our experiment indicate that methods used in volunteer motivation studies can also be applied in student motivation context. We also identify the differences and similarities between feelings related motivation determinants in the web based studying context and in the web based volunteer work.