Motivation is essential in the learning process of university students, and teachers should have a wide range of strategies to address this issue. The emergence of social technologies has had a considerable influence in e-learning systems, and a number of experts state that their use is a good method to motivate students and to increase their participation in activities. This study attempts to determine whether social networks and social applications should be viewed as many other tools or whether they can actually provide extra motivation for students to participate. The study compared the percentage of student participation in tasks of self-assessment. The experiments covered three traditional strategies of student motivation and another one in which social networks were used to introduce, explain and deliver the self-assessment tasks. The case with a higher participation was the one in which students obtained a reward from the completion of the activity. Despite this result, the statistical analysis indicated that the use of social networks obtained similar results as a strategy of continuous and regular motivational speeches.

翻译：动机在大学生学习过程中至关重要，教师应掌握多种策略应对这一问题。社交技术的兴起对电子学习系统产生了显著影响，许多专家指出其使用是激励学生并提升其活动参与度的有效方法。本研究试图厘清社交网络与社交应用应被视为普通工具，还是确实能为学生参与提供额外动力。研究通过比较学生在自我评估任务中的参与比例展开实验，涵盖三种传统学生激励策略以及另一种利用社交网络发布、解释和交付自我评估任务的策略。实验结果显示，学生参与度最高的情境是完成活动可获得奖励的情况。尽管如此，统计分析表明，使用社交网络所获效果与持续定期进行激励性演讲的策略效果相当。