What could I learn from this wonderful post of motivation?
Would these principles on What demotivates workers be applicable in the case of motivation of learners and educators in online courses? Just replace the word of workers by learners, and we will get a wonderful set of guidelines on What demotivates learners:
Hype: A failure to acknowledge the real difficulties the learners face.
Futurism: Pointing down the road at “difficult or impossible future goals” and not at the tangible achievement of learners’ recent efforts.
False democracy: Inviting learner’s input when the leader (educator) already made up his/her mind.
“And that’s a key point: in addition to demotivating talented workers (learners and educators), an opaque and dictatorial leadership style can silence innovation from below, leaving the leader in charge of coming up with all the great ideas. Nobody’s that good – not even Steve Jobs.”
So, motivation could be a critical success factor in distance education and online learning. What is needed is to explore the assumptions behind those factors – the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Will explore motivation and leadership in another post. Forthcoming!
Learner Weblog 
Great messages: confront brutal facts. Disagree and commit. Love it and I distributed it widely in my organization. 🙂