Designing an engaging digital learning tool: A report on a motivation study and its impact on the design of an online learning tool

Communication skills are critical to the success of students entering the working world as professional engineers because effective writing underpins many of their duties. Unfortunately, engineering curricula are usually filled with discipline-specific courses, leaving little room for communication-related electives. Some engineering programs have started to integrate communication instruction into their existing curricula. However, subject instructors frequently struggle to teach communication skills in their courses as lessons often extend beyond their areas of expertise, and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs are not available at every school. Our project addresses this problem through the development of an online self-learning resource that incorporates video lessons, self-assessment activities, and hands-on exercises. This paper describes a major challenge that we encountered while testing our online self-learning resource-motivating students to try the tool when they are not required to use it-and how we addressed the problem by conducting a testing exercise of motivation approaches that lead us to modify the ways we engage students in the online self-learning resource.