Contemporary education has shifted away from the one-size-fits-all concept and blended various processes like field visits, competition, and career sessions. Competitions play a crucial role in inspiring learners to excel and perform better, offering more rewards than the set price. Moreover, participating students display skills, gain experience, ethics, and self-disciple, evaluate and analyze outcomes, and discover personal abilities. Competitions encourage learners to develop skills and ideas while adopting innovative techniques useful in their future life. While competitions facilitate the development of motivation and intrinsic motivation, improper packaging and purpose discourage learning.
The safety of students is the priority in an online competition to curb cases of negative social habits. The spirit of competition reveals personal strengths and weaknesses while nurturing the mechanism of coping with negative emotions when one does not win (Bates). This enables students to confront the fear of challenges hence developing self-esteem. Competitions have a set price for the winner, which requires learners to invest a lot of time and effort to achieve results. This compels learners to identify intrinsic motivation that enables them to stay composed even under pressure and overcome hurdles.
Healthy competitions nurture inquisitiveness and social skills like cooperation and communication, especially in-group or teamwork. Students learn new skills crucial for personal development as well as ethics and self-discipline (“COVID-19 Online Instruction Survey Findings | AACSB”). Healthy competitions spark learners’ passion while exciting them to develop a positive self-image when dealing with failures and analyzing outcomes. On the contrary, unhealthy competitions emphasize winning, derailing students from the benefits of learning, and having fun.
Competitions are beneficial if the attitude of learners is positive. Participants need to set realistic expectations to reduce the pressure that may lead to demotivation and disappointments. Healthy competitions encourage the development of skills like discipline, intrinsic motivation, and self-esteem, which are useful in students’ future lives.
Works Cited
Bates, Tony. Online Enrolments after Covid-19: A Prediction, Part 2 – Policy Implications | Tony Bates. www.tonybates.ca, https://www.tonybates.ca/2020/04/16/online-enrolments-after-covid-19-a-prediction-part-2-policy-implications/. Accessed 27 June 2020.
“COVID-19 Online Instruction Survey Findings | AACSB.” AACSB Business Education Intelligence, https://www.aacsb.edu/blog/2020/march/aacsb-quick-take-survey-on-covid-19-online-virtual-instruction-findings#gsc.tab=0. Accessed 27 June 2020.