BitDegree Has Teamed Up with Vilnius University to Research the Impact of Economic Incentives on Students’ Online Learning Motivation BitDegree Follow Mar 29, 2019 · 3 min read

Online course completion rate is disappointingly low at 5%. Vilnius University researchers and BitDegree have joined forces to research a new way to tackle this problem.

We’re proud to announce that researchers from the Economics and Business Administration Faculty of Vilnius University (VU), one of the oldest universities in North-Eastern Europe, have shown a great interest in BitDegree’s new ideas for online learning and have entered into a joint research and development project that will explore new ways to motivate online learning through blockchain-based economic incentives and gamification elements. It will be the first research project in the world to assess the impacts of economic incentives with tangible monetary value on learning motivation of online students. In short — does paying to learn influence online learning success and most importantly, how?

“Research has shown that adding the elements of gamification, including incentives, into the learning process can increase students’ motivation and desire to complete a course. Competition and rewards for completed tasks increase students’ engagement and help them go deeper into the subject and farther in their learning journey. Together with the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Vilnius University, we’re aiming to identify the ways to leverage those elements to help the online course completion rates grow and to generate an even higher inflow of those using online education platforms,” says Ervinas Rimdeika, CEO and co-founder of BitDegree.

The first research investigating the link between economic incentives and online course completion rate

“Nobody has conducted research in this field before,” says VU professor Vytautas Dikčius. “It’s interesting from the scientific perspective, and it can effectively help turn the online education to be more successful and relevant to the job market. Economic incentives can ease the dilemma and show the way towards the right decision — to continue learning. In our research, we want to confirm this link and investigate the cases when we can expect positive outcomes.”

For this, nearly 800,000 EUR have been allocated to this project by the European Regional Development Fund under the program “Intellect. Common Scientific and Business Projects”. The total value is over 1.3 million Euro. Additional funds will be used to create even more valuable system in cooperation with experts from the best university in Lithuania. The joined effort will be based on consistent and scientifically valuable research. VU will isolate and run multiple pilots to identify the direction in this very broad field.

Validating BitDegree’s effort on a scientific level

This cooperation will blend into BitDegree’s overall aspiration to motivate more people to get their practical skills online fast, learning from the experts in their fields. We’ll actually investigate deeper the impact that our offered incentives make on students’ motivation to complete online courses. We’ve been testing our scholarship campaigns with companies from different fields, such as web hosting, management consulting, industrial control and automation, and we’ve got several upcoming campaigns including economic and employment incentives. We opened the window to an enlarging scope of research participants which will be used by scientists from VU in a well organized, scientifically valid way which will eventually bring more insights into this currently unexplored land.

VU research team will isolate their aims investigating the motivational impact made by economic incentives, by offered job opportunities, or both. BitDegree will craft the offers so that they can be used in such studies to get scientifically valuable results.

We’re proud and delighted that this cooperation will bring much more scientific weight and value in BitDegree’s plans and aspirations! In the next two years planned for this project, we’ll get stride by stride closer to clearer insights of how our ideas work in the real world, and to having more elaborated tools to tailor our motivation strategy for online learning.

BitDegree shooting upwards and onwards — always!