Qualitative analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in online teaching assistants, revealing implications for job performance.
External online teaching assistants play a critical role in online courses in higher education. They are hired by third-party instructional support institutions and work for faculty members to teach online courses for a semester-long period. Due to the distinct nature of the job, previous studies provide us with little understanding of how they are motivated and what sustains their efforts for students’ learning experience. This study examines different types of motivations of external online teaching assistants by using a qualitative approach and uses survey questionnaires to examine how their motivation is related to job behaviors and performance. The study findings support motivation literature that intrinsic (autonomous) motivation shows a positive relationship with job behaviors and performance, but does not show a significant impact from extrinsic (controlled) motivation.
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Mehng et al. (2025) studied this question.
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