I’m no Peter Norvig, but this is the discussion section after all....
One tool that may or may not have a place in online education is gamification. To put a long story short, the gaming industry has gotten plenty of practice motivating people to keep going, even at tasks that wouldn’t necessarily be the most interesting. Other industries have finally noticed this, and started trying it out to see which concepts from gaming carry over well to other fields. I don’t personally know of any research specific to education, but would be interested if anything relevant was found
An enthusiastic, low-level introduction to gamifying education: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamifying-education
I might as well take a shot at explaining. Pascal’s wager says I might as well take on the relatively small inconvenience of going through the motions of believing in God, because if the small probability event occurs that he does exist, the reward is extremely large or infinite (eternal life in heaven presumably)
Pascal’s mugging instead makes this a relatively small payment ($5 as Yudkowsky phrased it) to avoid or mitigate a minuscule chance that someone may cause a huge amount of harm (putting dust specks in 3^^^^3 people’s eyes or whatever the current version is)
Thus for both of them people are faced with making some small investment to, should an event of minuscule probability occur, vastly increase their utility. A lottery ticket