Description du sujet de thèse

As part of their course, students are required to undertake collaborative projects of medium or long duration, during which they learn to manage a project by coordinating activities, distributing work, and making collective decisions. Students generally rely on shared dashboards to monitor progress and completion of activities, without necessarily considering motivational factors. They alternate between individual work phases and collaborative activity phases, using various digital collaborative tools and devices, which creates different dynamics and work strategies. This variability in collaboration configurations (synchronous / asynchronous / co-located or remote) can influence the social regulation of activity (the set of processes collectively implemented to plan, monitor, and evaluate the activity), potentially hindering smooth collaboration and learner engagement. Learners may find it difficult to perceive the progress of other group members or the impact of their individual work on the group, and thus struggle to stay engaged and motivated throughout the project. Furthermore, this group coordination primarily focuses on the activity itself, without considering the emotional and motivational aspects that affect not only each student individually but also the group as a whole at a collective level. The development of non-technical skills remains an integral part of the core competencies students are expected to acquire during their university studies.

In this context, this PhD aims to measure the group motivation of learners engaged in mediated collaborative tasks, involving individual motivations and their interactions within the group.
One challenge is identifying motivational interactions that can be proposed within collaborative work environments used by groups of learners, at both individual and collective levels. The design of these interactions is based on psychological motivation theories and can take various forms, such as game mechanics like competition, progression, or sharing of performances, motivational messages, and interactive visualisations of indicators. Although some aim to support the psychological need for relatedness, these interactions are often tailored to each individual and are not, or only minimally, intended for the collective. Another challenge concerns different time scales, as student projects can last from a few days to several months, as well as the group size, ranging from pairs to more than a dozen learners working on the same project. A final challenge relates to fluctuations over time in both collective and individual motivation and collaborative processes (regulation and engagement), which require dynamic measures.

To address these challenges, the overall aim of the thesis is to develop a framework for measuring the impact of motivational interactions integrated into collaborative learning environments on learners engaged in project-based educational activities. This framework will facilitate the identification of measurement tools to be used depending on the proposed motivational interactions and the expected impact on learners, in terms of motivation and collaborative processes. Specifically, this framework will help identify inter-individual differences (in terms of motivation, level, social skills, or psychological profile) and their dynamic impact on group motivation over time.

Contexte de travail

The PhD student will work in the SICAL team at LIRIS, recognised for its expertise in HCI and education, including adaptive gamification, engagement, learning analysis, and the design of motivational affordances in education. They will also collaborate with the “Cognition Perception Usages” team at LISN, led by Jean-Claude MARTIN, who specialises in psychological theories and models of motivation, personality, and social interactions, as well as the design of personalised mobile interactions with expressive virtual agents. As part of the project, the PhD student will work with students from INSA Lyon and Université Lyon 3. Finally, within the PEPR Ensemble programme, which funds this PhD, the student will attend seminars and summer schools on digital collaboration.

Le poste se situe dans un secteur relevant de la protection du potentiel scientifique et technique (PPST), et nécessite donc, conformément à la réglementation, que votre arrivée soit autorisée par l'autorité compétente du MESR.