Sustaining Motivation Through Community and Self
Start Any Time
Work on your pace and you will have instructors available to help you answer any questions.
Duration
Approximately 2 weeks, 6-8 hours/week
Fee
$500 Professional Rate
$200 Full-time Student Rate
*Proof of full time student enrollment required. Acceptable forms of id include a letter from your university’s registrar office or an unofficial transcript. Email your documents to learnlab-help@lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Certificate Course Description:
This course explores how social connection, identity, and reflection shape lasting learner motivation. You will learn to design features that foster belonging, peer support, and healthy comparison while protecting learners’ comfort and privacy. Through identity-affirming design, reflective tools, and resilience-building practices, you will discover how to help learners see themselves as capable, evolving participants in their learning journey. By the end, you will be able to integrate social and identity-based strategies into a personalized, context-aware roadmap that sustains engagement, ownership, and growth across long-term learning experiences.
Module 1: Designing for Social and Peer-Driven Motivation
- Design platform features that support learner motivation through social belonging, peer support, and community engagement
- Implement inclusive social motivation systems that accommodate diverse learner preferences, privacy needs, and comfort levels with public comparison
- Evaluate the motivational impact of social comparison features and design strategies to balance engagement with emotional well-being
Module 2: Fostering Long-Term Motivation Through Identity, Reflection, and Resilience
- Design identity-affirming features that help learners internalize positive roles and see themselves as capable, evolving participants in the learning journey
- Develop learner-facing reflection and self-regulation tools that support long-term motivation by reinforcing progress, resilience, and ownership
- Synthesize motivational design strategies across all units to build a personalized, context-aware roadmap for sustaining engagement, identity, and autonomy in real-world EdTech contexts
Module 3: Course Project or Final Exam
At the end of the course, you’ll have an opportunity to do a little project where you can choose to work on topic of your choice. That will provide you with a nice experience to apply the fundamentals you will learn in the modules to a larger, more authentic, context getting feedback from experts.
You will have an alternative option to take a final exam where you will answer 30 questions. The exam can be taken multiple times and each time new questions are randomly selected from a pool of questions.
You are also free to do both the course project and the final exam, we will consider the one in which you score more for counting towards the certificate.
No prerequisites required, finishing the prior course in series Designing for Motivation in EdTech will be helpful and is recommended.
Researchers, learning designers, UI/UX designers, instructional designers, and students who want to learn about how to motivate their learners. Anyone interested in edtech.
What you'll learn
This course will help you:
Design for social motivation by creating features that foster belonging, peer support, and community engagement while protecting diverse learner preferences and privacy.
Evaluate and balance social comparison systems to maximize engagement while safeguarding learners’ emotional well-being.
Foster long-term motivation through self-focused strategies by designing identity-affirming, reflective, and self-regulation tools that reinforce progress, resilience, and ownership.
Integrate social and self-based approaches into a personalized, context-aware roadmap that sustains engagement, autonomy, and learner identity over time.
Course Instructors
Dr. Amy Ogan
is an Associate Professor of Learning Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Ogan has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction supported by a fellowship from the Institute of Education Sciences. Her main area of research is focused on ways to make learning experiences more engaging, effective, and enjoyable. She is also the Director of Learning Sciences for Innovators, which helps companies in Africa refine and scale edtech products using evidence-based methods that support engaging and effective learning experiences…
Certificate
Upon successful completion of the program, participants will receive a verified digital certificate of completion from Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative.
In addition to the knowledge and immediately applicable frameworks you will gain by attending your selected courses, you will benefit from:
- A digital, verified version of your Executive Certificate (Smart Certificate) you can add to your resume and LinkedIn
- Networking with a global group of your peers and instructors for advancing your career
Register Now
Register and start taking the course in three steps:
1. Enter your name and email address.
2. Create your account here to access our learning platform.
Have questions? Our learning engineers are here to answer them at our monthly live AMA events! Join us at 4 PM EST on First Fridays, or 10 AM EST on Third Mondays. Registration required.