Use loss aversion to keep learners motivated
What if you gave learners their credential upfront and then forced them to keep it?
Behavioral economics has taught us a lot about how humans act irrationally. Sometimes it frustrates me, but it also makes me forgiving of people, including myself. Even better, you can use our “predictable irrationality” to help make learners more successful.
One concept I find fascinating is loss aversion. In a nutshell, we often feel the pain of losing something more than we enjoy the buzz of gaining it. This is a big part of why people often overbid in auctions. Why? Because when their bid is (temporarily) the highest, they start to think of themselves as owning the thing they are bidding on. When somebody outbids them, they feel the pain of losing something that is “theirs.” Fighting that pain makes them bid higher, perhaps higher than they thought they would initially.
You see this in other businesses as well. Businesses always want you to think about how something “is already yours, you just have to keep it.” I remember seeing an ad campaign recently (I think it was Toyota, but couldn’t find it online) where the slogan was “the car is yours, you just have to sign for it.” It was a sly way of making people feel loss aversion. It’s not “sign and the car is yours,” it’s “if you don’t sign, you lose your car.” That’s a bit extreme, but shows how savvy advertisers understand this thought process.
In education, we pretty much always do things the opposite way: we offer our learners a carrot at the end of a long road. What if we instead gave them the carrot at the start and said they need to work to keep it?
We sometimes do a half measure with college degrees. In business school, I put “MBA Candidate” on my LinkedIn the second I was accepted. Or people put the “anticipated” date for their bachelor’s. But what if we went one step further on the loss aversion strategy, especially for learning tracks that don’t have the definitive finish lines that universities have?
We could create something like an “expiring credential” (or exploding credential)? Imagine a company like Springboard, which offers an innovative mentor-supported curriculum in a variety of segments like Data Analytics (or my own employer, Kenzie Academy, which offers Software Engineering and UX certificates). What if, once a learner enrolled, she could put the completion certificate on her LinkedIn, with a completion date on it, or even a countdown clock? Then she would be constantly reminded that the certificate is hers, she just needs to keep it. If the clock expires, she loses her credential. In a professional setting, you could put a vacation day on an employee’s calendar, and then remind them if they complete by that date they get the day off — otherwise, they’re working!
There are technical and pedagogical reasons ramifications, of course! But it’s an example of how we could make the irrationality of our learners work to the benefit of their learning.
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