Your aim as an online course producer is to constantly give the greatest quality information to your students so they achieve their goals and overcome challenges. And you can do all of that by developing distinctive, useful, and entertaining course material. If your students are completing the course and returning to you with accolades about how it impacted their life, then congrats!
As an online instructor, you're doing an excellent job. However, if you observed that your students aren't as involved as they may be, it could be worth looking into the finest student engagement tactics to assist you enhance your online course.
Engaging with purpose
Student engagement is a metric to quantify how interested students are with the course material and lectures. The return on investment may be evaluated by looking at how much time and effort students put into lectures, how well they understand the topic, and how much they get out of the experience.
Let's imagine you teach a course on how to organise your house online. In your classes, you discuss the significance of being organised, the best techniques to do so, as well as hands-on exercises. Then you offer kids chores to arrange little spaces around their house, from their work desks to kitchen pantries.
If your students finish course content and homework, you have strong student engagement. Additionally, your students are likely pleased with your teaching methods.
Metrics that matter
It's really simple: High student engagement presupposes students learn from your course material. It also means the more involved your students are, the more eager they are to finish the course. By doing this, you'll get a better grade and be more likely to finish your course.
A greater completion rate and better satisfaction with your course helps you develop fans of your courses. These are the people who will sign up for new courses as soon as you make a new one available. And, those same students will be individuals who promote your classes to others.
The following are six practical methods for fostering student involvement:
Increasing your student engagement is straightforward and extremely doable with these basic yet successful student engagement tactics that any online course designer may implement to their business:
Strategy 1: Make it interactive
Interactive learning is the most common student engagement technique. When compared to passive learning, studies suggest that interactive learning can improve student comprehension by as much as a factor of six.
The following are some suggestions for enhancing the interactivity of your online course materials:Fun quizzes: Create interactive quizzes for your students to assess their knowledge when they're studying a new subject. You can include it at the end of each lesson or the end of each module. Learn how to add quizzes to your Teachable course here.
Provide a variety of formats: Giving your students the flexibility to pick between video, audio, and printed lecture content may assist improve their engagement. Options assist guarantee people continue with the course content no matter their circumstances or learning style.
Workbooks: Providing your students with downloadable workbooks tailored to go together with your course content may be an incredible approach to enhance student engagement.
Assignments: Theory alone might grow repetitious and dull students' interest. Give your students a means to adjust the pace of the course with short activities that take the theory they learned and allow them to put it into practise.
Strategy 2: Keep your course content brief and to the point
You have a lot to contribute to the world and a lot of expertise in your industry. If you're charging a premium for your online classes, it's only logical that you'd want to share what you've learned with your students. Although it is said that "less is more," you are aware of this axiom. Well, when it comes to the online course curriculum, that's quite accurate.
Step back and reevaluate your programme if you see kids aren't as interested as you'd like them to be. Simplify and make it as plain and easy to go through as possible, with obvious main themes you want your pupils to master inside each lesson.
Provide individual or group coaching as a third strategy.
Another wonderful student engagement method is one-on-one or group coaching service. This method might be wonderful not only for your students and to enhance engagement but to also help you increase your price. Because you'll be offering your pupils your time and access to you, you may charge a premium fee. So, this technique is a win-win for everyone.
The course completion rate and overall student engagement are much greater when students are part of a cohort. So, if mentoring is not your preferred manner of teaching, you can consider about designing an online cohort course instead of a self-paced one.
Strategy 4: Create a network for kids to connect
Providing your students a community to connect with while completing your course is a very successful student engagement method. Plus, it's straightforward to adopt and is cost-effective. You can simply provide your students room to interact by starting a Facebook group or employing Circle where they can ask questions, help one other, and inspire each other to work on their objectives.
Allow your pupils to ask you questions in your community. Maybe offer monthly Q&A sessions or live sessions where your students get to communicate with one other and you. A minor modification like introducing a community in your course may make a tremendous effect in your overall student happiness.
Method number five: Provide modest rewards for achieving goals.
Researchers have shown that rewards can assist students be more interested with their lectures and boost their general engagement even with out-of-school activities. So, as an online course builder, you should take advantage of this student engagement method and use it in your course.
Here are a few suggestions for successful incentives:
Offering a certificate of completion at the conclusion of the course motivates students to finish the programme and get their diploma.
Badges/trophies: If you're utilising a community, you may give users different badges or awards for engagement and involvement. The same may be used to Facebook groups where the most involved students can be elevated to Moderators, providing students the motivation to interact more.
Exclusive features: Another technique to persuade students to engage is via delivering a particular reward. You may showcase your most engaged students on your social media or in your newsletters, sharing their results with others.
Sixth, encourage pupils to discuss their findings with their peers.
Finding a mechanism to keep your students accountable is the final student engagement approach worth attempting. Encourage your kids to share their accomplishments and victories with the class as a whole.
For example: Let's suppose you provide yoga lessons. For a "Yoga for beginners" course, you may develop an incentive to encourage individuals to post their before and after images of their yoga positions to illustrate their growth. Promote the photos on your website or urge the students to share them in a private student group.
Either way, your students will be driven to engage more and put in the effort to improve their yoga technique because they'll want to share their improvement with other people who will commend them for their development.
Whatever method you choose to use to draw in your pupils, be sure to do so in a honest and natural way.
