Creating an intrinsic-motivation-driven course design method

The low-cost intrinsic motivation (IM) course conversion project is an effort to create a new system of course design that focuses on creating scalable and sustainable courses that emphasize promoting students' IM to learn. Unlike many course design methods such as idea-based learning, project- or problem-driven learning, or “flipped” classrooms, which first ask, “How do we help students learn X better,” we ask “how do we foster intrinsically-motivated learners who want to learn X?” While this course design method still uses theories of cognition to design course structures, it uses motivational constructs such as purpose, autonomy, relatedness, and competence as the primary design considerations of a course. Secondarily, the course design method considers and documents the financial, time, political, and psychological costs of course design. In this paper, we present a preliminary attempt to formalize this IM-driven course design method as well as a system for evaluating the short- and long-term costs of implementing a specific course design.