Despite the rapid growth of online learning in higher education, the dropout rates for online courses has reached 50 percent. Lack of student engagement rank as a critical reason for frequent online course dropout. This article discusses autonomy support as a strategy to enhance online students' intrinsic motivation and engagement. Drawing from current theories and research, three guidelines are offered to provide choices, rationale behind why assignments are designed in particular ways, and flexibility in completing more personally meaningful assignments. Each guideline is accompanied with examples from existing higher education courses. This article is intended for educators and designers of online learning to employ autonomy support strategies to engage students in active participation and successful completion of the course.
Informed by a larger post-intentional phenomenology on those who self-disclose deep and significant experiences of connection with and through music listening, this work highlights glimpses and manifestations of the listening act. Interviews with one participant from a larger study afford insights into experiences of a music listener. Philip described moments of resonating and reverberating connection expressed through the manifestations of embodied resonation, sympathetic chords and the found mirror. For Philip, listening to music created spaces and opportunities for leisure that yielded feelings of deeply meaningful and personal affirmation, validation and connection. Through music's ability to speak to, and thus speak for Philip, he experienced leisured moments of receptivity, vital engagement and a re-sensitivity to his sense of self and place within a larger community.
Within this article, we attempt to counter the seriousness that sometimes tends to weigh down academic pursuits. Although we acknowledge the necessary anchors that tether us to various obligations in our work, we enact a form of play that emerged over the course of our dissertations and extended into our budding careers. We call this form “going Gonzo.” By recounting the emergence of trickster figure within our work—who we simply call “Phillip”—we demonstrate how this form of play enabled us to strategically pull back and stretch forward in moments and spaces of intense tension. Ultimately, we describe this trickster in relation to a ludic logic of embracing the profane, foolish, and tenuously important as a way to garner levity and buoyancy amid the necessary anchors of seriousness of research.
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