Key Findings

The key findings from the project included:

• The investigation revealed that students enrolling in mid-career management programmes were motivated by factors in their domestic and work environments that provided the triggers to the enrolment decision. These included situations such as children leaving home or no longer requiring significant parenting, retrenchment, downtime, or dissatisfaction in the work situation.
• Motivations for enrolling were often expressed in extrinsic terms initially, especially by younger male students, whereas female students and older males tended to articulate their motivation for study in terms of intrinsic motivators. Many respondents indicated that their motivations changed as a result of their studies, articulating increased intrinsic motivation and a lesser emphasis on extrinsic motivations.
• Such changed motivations were reflected in a change in respondents’ study goals and career ambitions. These changes often manifested in new ambitions, unanticipated career changes and an increased desire to study further. In some cases, personal changes indicated increased self-confidence, including a sense of movement, of increased self-awareness, of reflection and of intrinsically motivated behaviour.
• The ability for students to tailor-make their study programmes based on their perceived study needs would have pedagogic advantage. Building such a capacity into the curriculum design, especially for post-experience management programmes would likely lead on to deeper learning and longer participation in the learning environment.
• Curriculum development and programme design should be based on an understanding of student motivation at the time of or prior to enrolment. Greater and more considered use of the selection process is expected to lead on to enhanced relevance of the programme, deeper learning and greater student satisfaction. For ICT professionals in New Zealand, the development of mid-career upskilling programmes can also contribute to national economic competitive advantage.

Key Recommendations

The key recommendations and the implications for learning and teaching from the project included:

Autonomy, competence and relatedness | Deeper learning will flow from institutional support for autonomy, the encouragement of competence and of relatedness. Accordingly, the greater the degree of self-determination manifested by a student, the greater the likelihood that that student will be engaged in deeper learning behaviours.

Motivations of enrolling students | A clearer understanding of the motivations of enrolling students will provide administrators with the ability to predict the likelihood of deeper learning. This seems to imply that deeper learning is more a function of student motivation than it is of teacher skills. However, this is not so. Teacher support for autonomy and competence through providing learning choices, greater student involvement in selecting course content, performance assessment and curriculum development is particularly important when dealing with mid-career students.

Encouraging feedback | On a personal level, encouraging feedback has an enormously important influence on the development of deeper learning behaviours. The attitude of teachers to their profession and especially to their students can encourage or destroy intrinsic motivation and therefore deeper learning in the student.

Student satisfaction | Student experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness in the learning environment need to be the focus of institutional endeavour if the institution is to achieve greater student satisfaction with study programmes, greater throughput, optimum completion rates and improved teacher ratings.