Meaningful experiences in virtual courses of programming fundamentals for engineers

The problems commonly associated with virtual education and the academic objectives that support higher education have not been unified in the specialized literature yet. How to achieve this unification? Through motivational strategies which achieve the success of virtual courses. These strategies must be totally different from those applied in face-to-face courses, since motivational factors in virtual education and face-to-face education are evidently different. Therefore, in this paper we propose two strategies to be used in motivating the undergraduate students, in order to improve performance in the subject of Programming Fundamentals in virtual mode. It is proved that fail rates of students decreased in groups were the motivational strategies were applied.