3 Handy Tips on How to Keep Students Engaged in Online Learning
One of teachers’ splitting headaches is the lack of student engagement in online learning. This article will walk you through 3 amazing tips to get eLearning students to stay engaged.
Let’s face it: eLearning can be dull! Students are bored stiff. And teachers fail to engage them. We may all see the signs: continual yawns, unexplained sleepiness, wandering attention. But, how to motivate online student engagement? That is never an easy task.
Today, let’s find out 3 tips for teachers to engage their students in virtual classes:
Boost Online Student Engagement through Personalized Lessons
The webcam can be an enemy of student engagement in online learning. It’s hard for students to feel they are as much cared for as in a physical classroom. As a result, they tend to become unfocused. Personalized lessons, however, are great at making them feel they are present in the class. Personalizing a lesson, for the most part, means making students feel this lesson is just for them.
For example, teachers can invent a math problem in which one of the students is the main character. He is struggling with a math problem and other students can help him by finding out the correct answer. It may sound like nonsense. But, let’s imagine how special a child may feel when becoming the main character in the class. Or, teachers can add to the lesson slides pictures of their students’ favorite movie stars or superheroes. With such personalized activities, students don’t feel like they are invisible. Chances are their morale will rocket.
Include Games and Quizzes to Increase Online Engagement
Nothing scares students as much as a slide with walls of text. Much to their dismay, many teachers use monotonous slides crammed with lengthy content. This is even worse when most young students have short attention spans.
To keep students engaged in online learning, games and quizzes can help in a big way. That is to say, teachers should divide lessons into small chunks with games, and quizzes at intervals. This helps inject a fun yet competitive spirit into the class. Students will always be on their toes, having no time to get bored. Besides, games don’t just mean fun. They also stimulate students’ cognitive development by improving memory and attention.
Another suggestion is to leverage gamification in the classroom. In fact, gamification has proved to do wonders for student engagement in eLearning. Let’s consider awarding points and badges when students complete their assignments. Or you can use leaderboards to boost their competitiveness. Awarding digital certificates is also a great idea.
Click the Start button to try this quiz created by ActivePresenter.
Diversify Teaching Styles to Keep Online Students Engaged
To improve student engagement in online learning, teachers need to change the way they deliver lessons. This can be a painstaking process. It requires creativity, effort, time, and especially good command of technology. Sounds like too much to handle but let’s start with a few simple yet effective suggestions.
Don’t just sit before the laptop and present slides. Teachers can play the role of a television anchorman instead. Or in science classes, why not impersonate a villain scientist in sci-fi movies? If you think this is way too hard to stage, don’t forget there are always good tools to help you become a green screen actor. ActivePresenter, for example, can help you do this with its green-screen effect. All you have to do is to insert your video into a chosen background picture or video. That’s it.
Another tip to engage students better in online learning is to avoid overusing written instructional materials. Instead, teachers should make use of screencast videos. Rather than reading a dry PDF, students prefer seeing how their teachers directly perform the task.
To capture students’ attention, using diverse types of content is recommended. These range from gifs, infographics, and animations to sounds. They don’t just add humor and entertainment to the lesson. Besides, they help simplify complex contexts and improve knowledge retention.
Final Thoughts
Dealing with the lack of student engagement in online learning is always a daunting task. Teachers need to understand factors affecting the ways to get students to stay engaged. Also, they need to upgrade their lessons tirelessly. Add more media. Make use of green-screen effect. Use screencast videos. And create games and quizzes. To do all of this, a powerful eLearning authoring tool like ActivePresenter is highly recommended. The software is perfect for teachers. It has a very easy-to-use interface and excellent customer service. You can download it for trial and enjoy all the features of the Pro edition. Let’s increase student engagement in your online class right now!
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