Using Course Movie Trailers to Affect Intrinsic Motivation

Abstract

This master’s thesis investigates the connection between movie trailer emotions, suchas curiosity, inspiration, interest, and excitement and motivation in order to examine ifa course movie trailer can be utilized to affect students’ intrinsic motivation. Based onexisting theory and research in the field we hypothesised that: "Students who watch acourse movie trailer as a course introduction, will maintain their intrinsic motivationbetter over time, compared to students who attend a traditional course introduction." Totest this hypothesis, we created a course movie trailer in collaboration with the teacher ofthe course MM-501, E-learning and Games at the University of Agder.The main approach of this thesis is a quasi-experiment that collects data from studentsattending the course. Two surveys were conducted over a period of three months. Theresults of the quasi-experiment were used to check for indications of differences in moti-vation between students who watched a course movie trailer and students who attendeda traditional course introduction in the same course. The results show a tendency thatindicates that the course movie trailer’s ability to trigger curiosity may have affected thestudents’ motivation to learn.