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Initial reflections
Motivating goal and objectives
Motivating course content
Selecting teaching strategies
Lessons learned from Sweden
Barriers in implementation
Initial reflections

I now know that if I really want to see motivation in my students, I have to be motivated to rethink what it is I am doing to them.

Asking any teachers from our university, what they think about today students, the answer will be standard:"... indifferent, careless and unresponsive fellows. They do not like to attend clasess and some do not even know where the library is. One has to visit xerox offices during the exam time and make appropriate conclusions about. Every day tons of sources for "external knowledge" are produced there for student use during the exam. Such a tradition has deep roots in our universities".

Making someone "scapegoats" for the bad things is the easiest way. It, however, does not provide a solution to the created problems. More effective in changing the situation would be reviewing from time to time our teaching and learning strategies teachers and reflect on the efficiency of the learning process.

Did cheating and indifference toward learning exist all the time in our universities? Was it brought by unstable economic and political conditions? Is it still possible to awake a curious mind, that one, in search of discovery?

One of the most popular type of teaching in our universtity is lecturing. There is no doubt of the benefits of lecture for explaining new and complex issues. Lecturing is also a solution for delivering the knowledge to a large numbers of students in classes. One cannot ignore experience accumulated over the years in lecturing and talent of brillant teachers. Limiting teaching only to lecturing, we can face a situation described by Fielder and Brent "... much of what happens in most classes is a waste of everyone's time. It is neither teaching nor learning. It is stenography. Instructors recite their course notes and transcribe them onto the board, the students do their best to transcribe as much as they can into their notebooks, and the information flowing from one set of notes to the other does not pass through anyone's brain".

An important step in learning is probable contructing a meaningful course design. Asking learners to get involved in the classroom activities, analyzing, judging, comparing and reflecting on what they are doing, can help them to think for themselves and not wait for a "magical insertion" of the knowledge into their head. We can make our lectures more interactive, by using examples from real life situations, applying controversial and innovative elements in introducing new course concepts and providing an atmosphere of discovery (7; 8; 9; 10).

There are many possible ways to bring about it. By tolerating student answers and appreciating good ideas. We have to select carefully the type of assessment we use. Introducing new learning activities, we need to consider if the guiding materials and time resources are sufficient enough. We can help a lot our students elaborating the course syllabi in the form of a learning guide and making our course plans flexible according to students needs. An important approach is to limit the factors that produce frustration. In this way it would be possible to stimulate communication between student and teacher, build a bridge between these two and decrease the potential of plagiarizing and cheating.