With the world shifting to a more flexible online elearning, student engagement has become a top priority of instructors and teachers worldwide.
Keeping students interested and involved in a virtual classroom is tricky because of the lack of in-person interaction.
But don’t you worry — in this article, we’ll discuss some proven strategies to increase students participation in online learning.
These strategies will help you enhance your students’ learning experience. This will, in turn, increase the effectiveness of your course material, boosting the completion rate and reducing dropouts.
So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
How to Engage Students in Online Learning?
School engagement is more than just talk (Tim, 2018). In fact, there are categories within classroom engagement (Fredericks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004):
- Behavioral Engagement: It includes students’ observable behavior and actions during classroom activities.
- Cognitive Engagement: It refers to students’ efforts to learn and understand new concepts.
- Affective Engagement: This is the level of students’ emotional involvement in the classroom.
Now that you are familiar with the fundamental types of student engagement, here are some actionable steps you can take to engage students in your online learning platform:
1. Goal-Oriented Approach with Rewards
You might be surprised to learn that only a small fraction of learners actually complete their online courses. The number varies between studies, but the reported completion rate of online courses is generally between 5% and 15%.
It’s evident that people lose interest in online courses over time. Thus, you need to keep encouraging your students to persevere.
Take a goal-oriented approach to your courses by setting specific goals for each learning module. Don’t forget to reward your students for completing each module.
Rewards can be as simple as a certificate celebrating your students’ accomplishments. This will act as a positive reinforcement for students to progress through the course.
2. Make Your Courses Mobile-Friendly
Over 90% of students today own or have easy access to smartphones. They are also more likely to finish a course if it’s accessible on a smartphone.
In a survey on mobile learning (M-learning), 70% of the respondents said they feel more motivated to finish a course on mobile as opposed to on a desktop.
Thus, it would help to make your educational materials accessible from mobile design so your students can learn anywhere and anytime.
Make them downloadable so that your students can learn even when they are offline. This will boost student engagement drastically.
3. Use Interactive Course Content
In Survata’s Student Pulse Survey (2017), only 3% of students were against interactive course material. 19% were okay with static PDF texts, and 36% preferred more interactive digital courses.
When asked about the most effective interactive elements in online courses,
- 68% preferred quizzes.
- 61% preferred videos.
- 61% knowledge testing (assessments).
Make sure you incorporate quizzes, video lessons, and assessments in your course. Not only that, you can spice things up by adding live streams, course prerequisites, a student forum, course progress, and expiry.
The interactive content helps keep learners engaged, active, and motivated for longer.
4. Implement Social Learning
Another way to increase student engagement is through social learning. By offering a collaborative and interactive learning environment, you can make learners feel involved in your platform.
When there is peer-to-peer learning, it strengthens the learning community and encourages them to participate and contribute.
This can be achieved by simply adding a small Q&A section to your course so that students can interact with peers and instructors.
You always have the option to expand it to a site-wise student forum that lets students share ideas, address curiosities, and plan ahead.
Moreover, you can give each student a public profile highlighting their courses, skills, and achievements. This will make their learning journey enjoyable.
5. Bring Together Multiple Industry Experts
A single instructor can make learning journey dull and boring through his monotonous teaching methods. This can lead to students abandoning the course midway through.
You can avoid this by having multiple instructors on your course. Each instructor will bring a unique teaching style and knowledge of expertise.
Furthermore, you can invite industry experts as guest lecturers to increase your students’ excitement. This will benefit learners as they can gain practical knowledge from not one but multiple perspectives.
The approved instructors can collaborate to create course content, assign assignments, and more to increase the engagement rate.
6. Personalized Learning System
You can facilitate a smooth learning experience for your students by adapting your course material based on the learner’s individual skills, needs, and abilities.
Students spend more time on personalized learning systems. This is because such platforms allow them to evaluate themselves and identify their areas of strength and weakness.
The personalized learning system lets them take ownership of the learning process, set goals, and make decisions. You can then guide them personally, considering their progress and necessity.
You can implement this in your course by introducing periodic assessments, personalized feedback, and one-on-one consultations.
7. Amazing Grading and Evaluation System
Evaluation systems aren’t always negative! Rather, it builds an environment for improvement. Regular feedback is another critical component.
Use a progressive grading system to evaluate student performance and provide constructive feedback encouraging students to improve.
Students are more likely to engage and improve their performance if provided personalized feedback.
Best LMS Platform For Student Engagement
Now, that you are done with the 7 step guide on improving student engagement in online learning, let me introduce you to Masteriyo.
Masteriyo is a revolutionary powerful LMS plugin that is made to keep ease and speed in mind. It is a perfect plugin to start an online course platform and increase student engagement.
You can implement all of the listed methods to increase student engagement on Masteriyo using its features and integrations.
Wrapping up
With this, we have come to the end of this article.
I hope this article helped you get familiar with some of the best ways to increase student engagement on your platform.
If you liked this article, feel free to share it with your friends and peers. Drop a comment if you have any feedback.
Finally, I’d like to wish you all the best for your educational journey!