Top 7 strategies to engaging students online during Covid-19
Introduction
It’s COVID - 19 outbreak now. The government has announced several public health emergencies and quarantine measures. The whole world is shaken and the Higher Education sector is not an exception. Engaging students online has become a universal concern now. The higher ed community is still facing challenges to transition students off-campus by making their courses and learning materials available online. According to research done by Huckins, it is quite true that at height of the pandemic students did express higher levels of anxiety, sedentary behaviors, and depression.
Engaging students online. How to do it right?
It’s more than a year since we are struggling with the Covid 19 impact. Student engagement in online learning is still a question. Distance learning does call for learning activities that keep the students engaged and focused. Apart from the motivation and impulse that the students are given, it is obvious that higher education institutions should focus on getting virtual engagement activities for students to keep them motivated. The blog details some tips on how to keep students virtually engaged.
How to make online learning more engaging?
Online student engagement activities - make use of the most you already have
Keeping students virtually engaged doesn’t literally mean that you have to reinvent the wheel. Make the most use of the virtual learning software platform that your institution already has. We are sure it has a lot of engaging features like an activity wall, personalized learning delivery, and few other great features like reactions, virtual hand-raising, etc.
Modern-day Learning Management Systems have insights and intuitiveness to create better student outcomes, all through their degree path.
Build an online community
Students feel a real thirst for online learning with this exciting feature for this works best. Faculty can motivate students to engage through discussion forums online. She/He could pose a simple topic, encourage students to brainstorm with each other on the discussion forum, and mutually learn.
This not only creates a sense of engagement but also enhances their relationship with the faculty on a personal level. Students come to understand that their faculty humanizes with them and is approachable.
Design real-world collaborative projects
This specific 21st-century pedagogical practice boosts student engagement in any virtual learning environment. The open-ended exploration of real-life situations and collaborative learning can turn out to be the most influential factors increasing student engagement. Students should be given proficiency to involve in open-ended discussions which will help their learning process become more relevant, meaningful, and challenging.
Get this done online with the help of tools like case studies, reports, research papers, presentations, which can work best as an engagement strategy. Students receive enhanced opportunities to manage their individual work, they receive peer feedback and support, supportive dialogue, self-reflection, partake ideas, create problem-solving ability, metacognition, and critical thinking, everything intended to improve the outcome of the given task.
Shorten the lectures, have supporting videos for an interactive session
Ideally in a virtual learning space, it is quite common for students to experience isolation, anxiety, depression, which could even lead to student drop-outs. In any given session, it is likely that students can have three different kinds of interactions. One, they interact with the content, two is interaction with the course instructors, three is interaction with peers. In an ideal learning environment, all three interactions are encouraged.
Student-content interaction
This could take forms like viewing instructional videos, multimedia interaction, or researching for information. To create and maintain an engaged community, instructors can support their courses with engaging video lectures, which are attention-seeking, relevant to the topic, to one concept, that the students can use to retain and recall.
Along with the video, the instructor can even add and integrate a quick assessment in the form of quizzes to understand the students’ understanding level. With Assessments integrated with quizzes, students get results in real-time, which helps them self-realize the mistakes and improve. With such a practice, there can be discussions on where they went wrong and brainstorm for improvement.
Student - instructor interaction
As for this to happen in online learning, the social presence of the instructor is integral. The instructor could indulge in virtual interaction that replicates the real classroom scenario.
Student - student interaction
To make this happen, instructors involve in asynchronous activities which could combine LMS integrated video conferencing, discussion boards, social media, that keep the students motivated and engaged.
Propel participation in the virtual classroom
Try this! Flipping your classroom has always stimulated deeper discussion during remote learning. Instructors can propel this by teaching new content asynchronously through pre-recorded videos, followed by online activities.
Do you know flipping classrooms will give you the benefit of spending less time on direct instruction? It even allows instructors to clarify concepts in a more targeted way for better student understanding. Try online forums, virtual collaboration boards, discussion prompts, students can have to and fro dialogue exchange, which will also boost their remote learning venture.
Pick up online brainstorming techniques!
Translate the normal brainstorming activities that you conduct in a traditional classroom setting into online and see the groups’ responses. One way of doing this is by dividing students into online groups and send prompts or questions through their Learning platform, Learning Management System. Each group shared their thoughts virtually and came up with their group’s responses the next day. This strategy will allow them to create and maintain a classroom community in a virtual setting.
While this is happening, the instructors can keep a track of the students’ progress based on their performance, and understand where exactly they struggle. Thanks to the insightful learning reports that the virtual learning platform offers these days, the instructors gain an in-depth look into how well the students are progressing and find ways to conduct gap analysis towards betterment.
Implement online Assessments
This could be a challenging area! With more and more online learning coming up, what matters the most is how to keep the students motivated and engaged? Students achieve the outcomes if only their objective of learning is understood well and if they start making contextual real-life connections. It is the duty of the instructors to make this path easier for the students. In between the lessons learned, she could plan out outcome-based formative assessments and provide instant feedback on the performance for lively learning to happen.
The modern-day online examination systems come with brilliant features including exa integrity, sharing the screen with proctor, auto device lock down, online proctoring, auto shuffling, etc.
In any online learning context, the assessments trigger student engagement with instant results and timely feedback. Without waiting for the final semester exams to approach, if instructors pick up their students’ knowledge after every class with small quizzes, MCQs, PPT’s, there appear a constructive approach in learning.
Conclusion
We understand, engaging students online can become challenging even to seasoned faculty and online teachers in this unprecedented time. In order to bring up the same passion, energy, and engagement during classroom learning, it’s high time the higher education community rush for a Learning Management System, which sets up a foundation for effective learning that you most expect.
Talk to our team to more about Creatrix’s cloud-enabled, mobile-friendly LMS that uses the technology’s advantage to inspire your students, let them set goals and help achieve them. With us you would get the next steps on how to motivate your students virtually and how to make online learning more engaging.
