Assignments that increase students' motivation in online courses

There is a high drop-out rate in distance courses. One of the reasons for this is that students miss the informal and collegial contact with other students that can be provided in on-campus courses. The presented study is based on an assumption that if students could be promoted to give each other more personal online feedback the students would also take initiatives to informal and collegial contact via collaboration tools. The presented experiments demonstrate that a combination of assignments during distance courses will highly increase the amount of spontaneous feedback between students.