Can we buy learners commitment and motivation?

Trainers and educators exert lots of efforts to design or plan for a learning event, they do their homework very well including all expected and unexpected preparations.

But sometimes there are not able to achieve learning objectives due to reasons related to learners.

We are feeling very bad when we put all of those efforts and due to learners’ motivation or commitment we will not be able to achieve learning outcomes.

Therefore I invented a method that we let people agree on it and help them get motivation and commitment, through the following two steps, it’s really very simple and fun at the same time:

First Tool: “Who will be the Best?” 

I assign a number to any of the participants and use it as a reward/sanction at the same time, if the learner is very active, demonstrating any of the desired behaviors (share something, follow rules, respond very well to questions, being in a team who wins, finish tasks on time, get the correct answer, etc) will be awarded a point/star, and vice versa (eliminating points/stars or give minus).

This will create a good environment of competitions between the participants each individual or team wanted to get a better result or finish on/before time; they will even monitor and manage themselves to give/take points.

Second Tool: “Donation box” or “Donation bottle”

On the first day of the training after we set training rules (definitely by involving the learners), I added two points to the rules after they finished: 

             1. If any of us (including me) delayed 1 minute; must pay SDG 0.5.

        2.  If their mobile rings or whatever any action related to the mobile, that person will pay SDG 5  pounds, as mobiles are very distracting to the learning process.

Don’t forget to prepare a “Donation box” or a “Donation bottle” to keep the money until the last day, try to be creative or use something that suits you and your learners.

Last words:

The ultimate goal is to create such kind of environment that is free, not threatening, enable anyone to participate and being active.

To add a little bit of fun, I buy lots of gifts with the money that we collected earlier (crazy stuff to make it really funny, expected and unexpected items). I divide the gifts based on their values and rank the participants based on the number of points/stars they get.

Delivery of learning is an experience, be passionate to get unbelievable outcomes.