Use of social networks to motivate computer-engineering students to participate in self-assessment activities

Motivation is essential in the learning process of university students, and teachers should have a wide range of strategies to address this issue. The emergence of social technologies has had a considerable influence in e-learning systems, and a number of experts state that their use is a good method to motivate students and to increase their participation in activities. This study attempts to determine whether social networks and social applications should be viewed as many other tools or whether they can actually provide extra motivation for students to participate. The study compared the percentage of student participation in tasks of self-assessment. The experiments covered three traditional strategies of student motivation and another one in which social networks were used to introduce, explain and deliver the self-assessment tasks. The case with a higher participation was the one in which students obtained a reward from the completion of the activity. Despite this result, the statistical analysis indicated that the use of social networks obtained similar results as a strategy of continuous and regular motivational speeches.