Educators often struggle to keep their students engaged in an online learning environment. If you’re familiar with these struggles or having a hard time to keep your students engaged in your online classes, read below some ways and strategies that’d help you to keep your digital learners engaged:
1. Capture Their Attention
It is essential to have the attention of the students in the class. Be thought provoking, give statistics or quick snippets of real life situations that will make your learner sit up and think. Once you have the ball in court, you’re halfway there.
2. Make Them Think
It is essential that your learner is curious about what they are going to learn. That interest needs to be there. What you can do is, use open input questions, also known as inquiry based learning. It will give them time to think about what they already know and what they are unsure of.
3. Only Tell Them What They Need To Know
Sharing limited and required information as planned for the session can be another way to keep students curious and engaged. Break information down into bite sized chunks and see your students absorb the learning fully. Clickable texts and graphics are extremely important to keep things interesting for the students.
4. Continuous Knowledge Checks
This is one of the most important things to do. A continuous check on learners’ knowledge throughout the course ensures that they are understanding and learning. Make sure you use ways that gives them practical knowledge as well, if need be. This will ensure that when needed they will be able to apply their knowledge and learning to realistic situations. You can also use multiple choice, drag and drop and give meaningful feedback to keep the transparency.
5. Use Storytelling
Storytelling is one effective ways to keep the learner engaged and interested in the content. It forms a relation between the subject and the learner that keeps the learner engaged and hooked to the subject. Storytelling brings life to the learning. Stories help the learners to relate to the concepts in real life situations, consolidating any new knowledge. You must incorporate this way in your eLearning sessions to keep your learners engaged in the sessions.
6. Include Formative Assessment
Using short formative assessments to personalize learning will allow the learners to get a better understanding of their knowledge. This will also help you check what they already know and identify the gaps in knowledge. And so, you can work around your students accordingly.
7. Adopt Responsive and Mobile Elearning
The biggest benefit of eLearning is the accessibility and mobility it brings to the learner. It is essential that you use tools and apps that bring the same to the learners. Having the ease of accessing the session anytime, anywhere opens a lot of opportunity and helps you reach masses.
8. Mix It Up And Get The Right Blend
Using various approaches to deliver the class can be another way to make it good. Webinars and short stories can break the monotony or e-learning courses. Pushing small knowledge bites to learner reinforcing and refreshing the learning.
9. Make It More Visual
Students need different ways to practice the content and one way that helps some learners is through visual learning. Students can use vocabulary, verbs or any content material to generate word art. Students can create a word cloud using paper and marker or try using a digital tool like WordCloud, or WordItOut, or other similar word cloud generators available.
After the word clouds are created, teachers can build on the learning potential by having students post their work in the classroom, having a gallery walk where other groups can discuss the terms, brainstorm new ideas, define or translate them (if a foreign language) and increase the authentic learning materials in the classroom.
Are you familiar with the struggles to keep learners engaged in an online learning environment? Share with us in the comment section below.
