Leading view papers – Days 1 to 7

Engaging online learners through flow

 

Many people willingly devote significant amounts of time and energy to recreational computing activities such as surfing the net and playing computer games. A recent random-digit-dial telephone survey of 2513 adults in the United States found that 13.7% of respondents (more than one in eight) found it hard to stay away from the internet for several days at a time (Aboujaoude et al., 2006). Similar devotion can be found among game players. A survey of 2982 players of massive multiplayer online role-playing games revealed an average playing time of 21.9 hours per week (Yee 2004).

The time and energy that many people willingly invest in recreational computing activities prompts the question: Is there some way of getting the same devotion to online learning environments?

Flow experiences

The glue that keeps web users and game players fixed in front of their computer screens longer than they planned to be there is a phenomenon known as ‘flow’ (Chou & Ting 2003; Chen 2006; Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Pace 2004; Sweetser & Wyeth 2005). Flow is a state of intense mental focus that occurs when a person’s perceptual and cognitive systems are challenged at near capacity, without being exceeded. It typically results in feelings of enjoyment and reduced awareness of factors that are irrelevant to the task at hand. For example, often while surfing the net or playing computer games, people become so immersed in what they are doing that they lose track of time and temporarily forget about their physical surroundings, their sense of self and their usual concerns. Consider the following description of a flow experience from a game player.

‘I used to play all the time at home and the computer was in the middle of the house. There were people walking past and what not. Mum would be talking to me and it wouldn’t even register that she was speaking. I would just be sitting there playing away. You’d look up and a couple of hours had gone by, and you didn’t even realise.’
22-year-old male game player

This paper suggests some strategies that educators could use to make online learning more conducive to flow experiences, and hence more enjoyable and intrinsically motivating. These suggestions are based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals who could recall experiencing flow while using the web or playing computer games (Pace 2004).

Interesting goals and meaningful feedback

Most flow experiences are reported to occur within activities that are goal-directed and bound by rules, allowing the participant to achieve an ordered state of mind (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 72). Computer games are ideal flow activities in this respect. Web navigation also involves goals and feedback, regardless of whether the web user is searching for specific information or browsing for stimulation. The important role that interest plays in the goal-directed flow experiences of web users is evident in the following comment.

‘It’s something that can hold my interest. Obviously, if it’s something your boss makes you do and you really don’t want to be doing it, it’s hard to get into it …  If you’re looking for something that you’re personally interested in, I think it’s quite easy to slip into that flow sort of state.’
21-year-old female web user

To be conducive to flow experiences, online learning environments must provide clear goals that are of interest to the learner, accompanied by meaningful feedback. Catering to the interests of individual learners might mean offering them choices within a differentiated curriculum. Gardner’s (1999) multiple intelligence community advocates ‘individually configured education’ that crafts curriculum, pedagogy and assessment to suit the intellectual strengths and interests of individual students. As appealing as this notion sounds, even Gardner (1999, p. 153) acknowledges the difficulty of implementing it on a wide scale.

Other approaches to engaging the interest of students might be found in the practices of the authentic learning community. Authentic learning is the idea of involving students in a process of meaningful inquiry to solve real-world problems that extend beyond the classroom (Rule 2006). For example, students may work on problems that are connected to their personal experiences or contemporary public situations (Newmann & Wehlage 2001). Yair’s (2000, p. 205) examination of major instructional reform efforts in US schools suggests that ‘students are academically stimulated in instructional units that are authentic, choice-driven, and demand skills’.

Balance between challenges and skills

A universal precondition for the flow experience is that the challenges an individual faces in a particular activity are equal to the skills he or she uses in meeting those challenges (Csikszentmihalyi 1997, pp. 30-31). Flow theory suggests that if the challenges of an activity are too high relative to one’s skills, one experiences anxiety. If challenges are too low, one experiences boredom. If challenges and skills are both low, one experiences apathy and the overall quality of the subjective experience is the lowest. If challenges and skills are both high, the likelihood of experiencing flow is maximised and the overall quality of the subjective experience is the highest. To illustrate this idea, consider the following comment from a game player who experiences flow while playing the challenging strategy game Warcraft.

‘In Warcraft you’ve got to try and build a town and then an army that can challenge and defeat the opposing teams. And in doing that, you’ve got to manage your resources and your population and all sorts of things like that. So it makes you work out how you’re going to do that. And then you’ve got to set to and do it. And while you’re doing that, the other team might be attacking you. You’ve got to take in factors like that. So it makes you think constantly.’
22-year-old male game player

Online learning materials, like computer games, must continually challenge the learner if they are to be engaging. Problem-based learning materials achieve this aim by anchoring all learning activities to a larger task or problem, and providing appropriate support for the student (Savery & Duffy 2001). The challenge must not be so difficult that it creates a sense of frustration, nor so easy that it produces boredom. Like an engaging computer game, the learning materials should progressively increase in difficulty as the student makes the transition from one level to the next. Ideally, learning materials should also be self-paced to give students further opportunities to match the challenge to their level of skill.

Focused attention

The higher-than-average challenges associated with flow activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand. An important by-product of this fact is that flow leaves no room in one’s consciousness for irrelevant thoughts, worries or distractions (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 58). Consider the following comment from a game player as an example.

‘Me and the game. Whenever I play a game, nothing matters. Nothing matters except the game. Nothing really in the corner of your eye could take your attention away from the game. It’s just you and the game, and that’s pretty much it.’
14-year-old male game player

People who experience flow frequently report that, while it lasts, they are able to forget about the unpleasant aspects of life. In everyday life, one’s concentration is rarely so intense that all preoccupations disappear from consciousness, but that is precisely what happens in a flow experience. All of the troubling thoughts that normally occupy the mind are temporarily suspended while the pressing demands of the flow activity consume one’s attention.

Not even the passage of time enters a person’s consciousness during flow if it is irrelevant to the task at hand. Time seems to pass faster than usual because ‘attention is one of the most important psychological processes that regulate the experience of time’ (Brown & Boltz 2002, p. 600). The following comment from a web user describes the distorted sense of time that people typically experience during flow.

‘I kept exploring the links in this site and it was very interesting - the information I was finding. Before I knew it, easily half an hour was gone, and I thought it was only five minutes.’
20-year-old female web user

Computer users tend to ignore minor distractions during flow because their attention is focused on the task at hand, but some distractions such as a ringing telephone or a broken internet connection cannot be ignored. Any external stimulus that has sufficient intensity, frequency or importance to cause a shift in the user’s attention will terminate a flow experience.

Poor interface usability can also be a distraction for computer users. Since attention is a limited resource, the more attention that is demanded by a user interface, the less that is available to focus on the task at hand (Kahneman 1973). Slow response times, disorganised content, inadequate navigation support, incoherent page layout, inappropriate colours, stale links and unnecessary pop-up windows are examples of potential problems. Interface usability is one area where designers of online learning environments can actively try to minimise the distractions faced by users, and thereby maximise the opportunity to experience flow.

Rich sensory experience

The preceding section discussed how the higher-than-average challenges of a computer game or web activity can focus a user’s attention on the task at hand. The rich sensory experiences provided by some computing environments can also help to focus the user’s attention. Brown and Cairns (2004, p. 1299) explain that ‘if gamers need to attend to sound, as well as sight, more effort is needed to be placed into the game. The more attention and effort invested, the more immersed a gamer can feel’. The following comment from a game player illustrates this point.

‘It was just like you were in the game as the main person. When you’re walking down the street people talk to you, and it’s like they’re actually there with you. I couldn’t hear or see anything else but the game. It was like it was my life. I could control how it changed.’
15-year-old male game player

Like websites and computer games, online learning environments can incorporate elements of vividness and interactivity into their design. They can provide both rich sensory experiences and rich cognitive experiences that engage the attention of learners over time.

Conclusion

Learning for its own sake is typically an enjoyable experience but the same cannot always be said of formal, institutionalised learning. As Csikszentmihalyi (2003, p. 80) observes, ‘the assembly-line methods commonly applied to education all too often produce neither joy nor learning’.

This paper has attempted to address the issue of student boredom and disengagement by presenting various strategies that may help educators make online learning more conducive to flow experiences, and hence more enjoyable and intrinsically motivating. These suggestions are a small step toward answering Norman’s (1996, p. 38) question of how to marry the entertainment world’s skills of presentation and engagement with the education world’s skills of reflective, in-depth analysis:
‘Educators know what needs to be learned; they are simply pretty bad at figuring out how to get the intense, devoted concentration required for the learning to take place. The field of entertainment knows how to create interest and excitement. It can manipulate the information and images. But it doesn’t know what to teach. Perhaps we could merge these skills.’

The path to such a merger can be seen in the flow experiences of web users, game players and other recreational computer users. By creating online learning environments that are amenable to flow experiences, educators can counter the trends of boredom and disengagement among learners and help them to achieve positive outcomes.

References

Aboujaoude, E, Koran, LM, Gamel, N, Large, MD & Serpe, RT (2006). ‘Potential markers for problematic internet use: A telephone survey of 2,513 adults’. In CNS spectrums: the international journal of neuropsychiatric medicine, 11(10), 750–755.
Brown, E, & Cairns, P (2004). A grounded investigation of game immersion. In CHI 2004 proceedings (pp. 1297 - 1300). Vienna, Austria: Association for Computing Machinery.
Brown, SW & Boltz, MG (2002). ‘Attentional processes in time perception: Effects of mental workload and event structure’. In Journal of experimental psychology: human perception and performance, 28(3), 600 - 615.
Chen, H. (2006). ‘Flow on the net - detecting Web users’ positive affects and their flow states’. In Computers in human hehavior, 22 (2), pp.221 - 233.
Chou, T & Ting, C (2003). ‘The role of flow experience in cyber-game addiction’. In Cyberpsychology and behavior, 6(6), pp.663 - 675.
Csikszentmihalyi, M (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperPerennial.
Csikszentmihalyi, M (1993). The evolving self: a psychology for the third millennium. New York: HarperPerennial.
Csikszentmihalyi, M (1997). Finding flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York: Basic Books.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2003). Good business: leadership, flow, and the making of meaning. New York: Penguin Books.
Gardner, H (1999). Intelligence reframed: multiple intelligences for the 21st century. New York: Basic Books.
Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Newmann, F. M., & Wehlage, G. G. (1993). ‘Five standards of authentic instruction’. In Educational Leadership, 50(7), pp.8 - 12.
Norman, DA (2006). ‘Optimal flow’. In Arts education policy review, 97(4), pp. 35 - 38.
Pace, S (2004). ‘A grounded theory of the flow experiences of web users’. In International journal of human-computer studies, 60(3), 327–363.
Rule, A (2006). Editorial: ‘The components of authentic learning’. In Journal of authentic learning, 3(1), pp. 1 - 10.
Savery, JR & Duffy, TM (2001). Problem based learning: an instructional model and its constructivist framework. CRLT Technical Report No. 16-01. Bloomington, Indiana: Center for Research in Learning and Technology, Indiana University.
Sweetser, P, & Wyeth, P (2005). ‘GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games’. In Computers in entertainment, 3(3).
Yair, G (2000). ‘Reforming motivation: How the structure of instruction affects students’ learning experiences’. In British educational research journal, 26(2), 191–210.
Yee, N (2004). ‘Hours of play per week’. In The Daedalus Project, 2(1). Retrieved 26 November 2006 from: www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000758.php

* Note. This paper has been adapted from a forthcoming article in the journal, Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development (sleid.cqu.edu.au)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Steven Pace is a senior lecturer in the School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Education, at Central Queensland University, Australia.

 

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