(Newswire.net — January 8, 2020) — Compared to physical classes, online courses require less direct interaction between the course creator and the students. However, things cannot be completely hands-off—a course creator must find a way to connect and engage his or her students for the course to offer optimum benefits. But how do you do this? Well, here are top the 7 tips that can help you keep your online students engaged.
1. Diversify Your Delivery Methods
Engage your student’s brains by using a wide range of delivery methods, including audio, text, presentations, and video. For video content, you can use different speakers so that your students don’t get tired of hearing and seeing the same face throughout the course.
2. Track Performance
Use video analytics to see how your students are interacting with the course materials. This will allow you to step in whenever your students are straggling with something. Some of the key metrics that you can check include:
- The number of students that are watching particular videos
- When they are watching the videos
- Whether or not they are watching the videos to the end
- How much of each video they have watched
You can then use the metrics to figure out why some students are struggling with certain sections of the course. For instance, you can compare how students are performing on some quizzes and how much they watched related videos.
3. Keep Your Course Content Simple
The last thing your clients want to do is to pay for a course then struggle to understand or navigate its content. Ensure that all parts of the course are easy to navigate. Remember that the attention span of online course learners tends to be shorter. So, strive to create a course that is self-paced and easy to navigate for improved engagement and ultimate learning and value of your course.
4. Include Creative and Attractive Rewards
Everybody loves to be rewarded, especially after meeting certain milestones. You can keep your students engaged by promising them some form of rewards after completing certain tasks. You can reward them with badges, discounts on subsequent courses, and certificates. This will not only ensure that they are engaged throughout the course but can also go a long way in ensuring that you have returning customers.
5. Create A Discussion Forum
This is one of the best engagement strategies for online courses. Forums allow students to ask questions, receive feedback from their peers, and process the course materials better. There are several strategies that you can use to engage your students through a discussion forum. To begin with, you can provide them with discussion questions to be answered in the forum. You can also put students into discussion groups where they can complete certain course-related tasks and get a chance to interact with one another.
6. Provide Timely Feedback
Giving students some feedback on their performance is critical, especially in the effort to keep them engaged. Prompt responses to email questions and discussion posts can help keep your learners on track for the next course materials or activity. Quick turnaround time on assessments can also have an impact on how students interact with future lessons or course materials. Most importantly, remember to give comprehensive and positive feedback as they tend to be more effective than unclear messages or faint praise types of feedbacks.
7. Assign Couches Or Assistants
You can also assistants or coaches to help you handle certain aspects of the course, including:
- Providing learning or studying tips
- Recommending resources to help students understand certain parts of your course better
- Helping students identify and design a working learning pathway.
- Reaching out to students at certain course millstones
Considering that online learning programs can be a lonely experience, assigning coaches and assistants to connect with your students can make the course more personal, increasing their engagement and ultimately boosting the value of your course. Client Engagement Academy course is great in terms of creating and optimizing an online course for maximum benefits.
Bottom-line
While online courses are an excellent choice for many students globally, it still requires a bit of learning curve on the part of course creators, especially when it comes to students’ engagement. Hopefully, the above tips can help keep your students engaged irrespective of the online course or class scenario—business, instructional, career, trade, or hobby classes.