There are all kinds of students in a classroom, some students are highly interactive while others may be shy to a fault. It then becomes a great challenge for educators to balance the different kinds of students, especially in online classes. We all agree that “teaching and learning require engagement”. Every educator is constantly trying to make their classes more interactive and exciting for optimal learning. It is also true that online teaching is subtly different from classroom teaching. So to make your online classes engaging you will need to take a slightly different approach.
11 Ways To Make Your Online Classes Engaging!
1. Use Audio and Video
It can be very difficult for the learners to keep up with facts, numbers, and all the information that needs to be understood. To make your online classes engaging you can take the help of pictures, graphs, graphics, videos, and audio descriptions. The visuals will stimulate the visual learners and the audio will help the auditory learners. Audio and visual instructions are also easier to follow and more engaging compared to long instructive texts.
2. Relatability
To get the attention of your students make sure you use the correct reference points, that is, use examples that might be relevant to your students. Also, give practical examples that can be used by your students in their life and career. This will make them see the importance of the subject when they compare it to their life.
You can also use current affairs to engage the students further and it shows the real-time importance of what you are teaching.
Case studies are another great way to engage your students. Case studies help analyze a situation from all angles and hence require full attention. They can be highly interesting to observe. Make sure you select the correct case study that is most interesting and relevant to your course and students.
3. Feedback
It is important to carefully analyze your student’s feedback. This can help you tweak the difficulty of your classes. Very difficult classes can be hard to keep up with and yet if the class is too easy the student may lose all interest. You will have to make sure the difficulty of your classes is just right, so they are engaging for your students.
Listening to feedback can also give you ideas for making additions to your existing course or creating a new one. Make sure you implement the changes suggested by your students to keep them interested and keep them learning!
4. Set Realistic Goals
Small goals can keep your students motivated and hooked. Putting too much pressure on students is never a good idea. If the goals are too hard to reach students may lose the motivation to pursue them. Hence it is important to break up the course into manageable bits and create checklists and/or tests to give your students a sense of progress while working on the course.
Setting hard-to-reach goals can often discourage students and seem demotivating. On the other hand, if the goals are realistic, reaching them will give positive reinforcement to the students to keep working hard.
You can also add a progress bar to your online course that shows the students how far they have come. All these little things keep students motivated and engaged in the course.
5. Talk To Your Students
It can be difficult to communicate with your students in online classes due to technical difficulties and privacy reasons. Although is important for you to make your students feel welcomed.
Make sure you know the names of your students. This will make them comfortable with you and they will be to ask questions and give their input more freely. Make sure to answer their queries and questions kindly and make them feel empowered. Your students should feel comfortable bringing up questions to you.
Giving your students personalized advice and help is important, this will be effective in improving their weak areas. This will make your students feel valued.
6. Storytelling Teaching Method
Probably one of the most effective ways to make your online classes engaging is using storytelling as a part of your teaching method. Try to incorporate storytelling in your teaching. Storytelling feels personalized and therefore shows empathy. This will strengthen the student-teacher relationship.
Online classes can often feel boring, stories will help you grab the attention of your students and at the same time deliver your lesson in a more interesting and interactive way.
Personalized stories feel furthermore important and so people listen to them keenly. If you can use personal stories to explain concepts your students will be more interested and connect to the subject more strongly.
Stories will also help your students recall the material they study later more effectively.
7. Encourage Peer Interaction
You can encourage your students to discuss among themselves by creating chat rooms. This will make your online class more engaging. Make sure to encourage your students to review each other’s work, this will keep them involved as a whole. This will also create a sense of belonging in the students. Peer evaluation also encourages students to the value sharing.
You can assign group assignments, and schedule group presentations or discussions. Presentations and discussions help absorb the material better.
8. Make Your Students Accountable
Use the feature of email notification to your advantage. Automate emails for students who don’t log in for more than 3 days and for those who don’t complete the given tasks required by the course.
This will show your students that they are not alone and that you as their teacher care for their input. These check-ins with your students will also allow you the space to connect with them and receive true feedback.
9. Make Your Online Classes More Social
Allow your students to share their views by providing the options to comment on your courses. This will open up a dialogue between the students and between you and your students.
This will also make your students feel their feedback is wanted and valued. All in all, this will make your online classes more interactive and engaging.
10. Use Quizzes To Make Your Online Classes Engaging
In your lectures, you can add quizzes to make them more interactive and hence engaging for your students. This will help the students to retain what they learn. Additionally, give them reinforcement to get more right answers in the next lecture. This will improve engagement in your current as well as future lectures.
11. Make Your Video Lectures Shorter
Shorter videos are able to capture more attention. This increases focus and retention of the subject that is being taught. Students also like video lectures to be short. You can use one video for one concept. In this way, if a student wants to review a particular topic they can easily refer back to it.
This will also come in handy for you when you have to update the information in the video lecture, as it is very important that your course is factually correct and up to date.
Also Read : 8 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Creating An Online Course
To Conclude
It takes lots of time and hard work as an educator to make your online classes engaging in addition to making your students feel welcome and comfortable.
New educators might find the begging of an online course very difficult, as it is definitely not easy to deal with students of different temperaments. Hence it is very important during that time that you keep your focus on the bigger picture. It helps to have reasonable expectations and understand the requirements of your students.
With time things usually fall into place and by being sensitive to the needs of your students you can easily make your online classes more comfortable and therefore engaging for them.
Exly can greatly help you with this!
You can design your website according to your particular requirements and add a particular feature that enables your students to participate more.
There are hundreds of templates that you can choose from to make your website visually attractive and engaging for your students. All of this and you don’t even have to code, this is not even the best part.
The best part is that you can set up your entire website in less than 5 minutes for absolutely no charge at all.
You can manage your business easily with the help of analytics and statistics provided by Exly. They will help you understand your students better and help you bring improvements to your business. The robust marketing will help you track and convert leads more effectively.
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