With a lot of demand on making online training more interactive and engaging and traditional eLearning losing funding but the demand for online training growing yearly at 8%. This article will show you what you can do to spice up your online training.
The most effective ways to make online lessons a lot more interesting are:
- Meet Your Students in a Web Conferences
- Social Learning
- Assign Interactive Tasks
- Divide The Course Into Shorter Lessons
- Include Real-World Equipment
- Add Competitions With Rewards
- Flip Your Classroom
- Include Gamification
Now you know what the most effective 7 methods of keeping your students interested are. Let’s find out what every method inflicts and which one is the best for your course.
Meet Your Students in a Web Conferences
The feeling of isolation is one of the most common reasons why students drop out of online courses. You definitely want your students to actively engage more often in your lessons. You can solve both problems with one simple solution: web conferences.
Meeting your students in a web conference is a great way to enhance their interest and to boost their motivation. You can build a better relationship with your students and become a real person in their eyes instead of an unknown person at the end of an email chat.
If you are not yet decided whether to use live meetings to teach online, I recommend you to read the following article:
ARTICLE: Teaching Live Online: The Pros and Cons
If you want to conduct live classes with your students, there are three important aspects you want to take into consideration:
- Equipment needed
- Software tools
- Meeting Guidelines
Equipment Needed
To take part in an online audio-video call you need to have several pieces of equipment. The mandatory hardware is:
- Laptop or Computer
- Webcam
- Microphone
You want to ensure a high-quality lesson for your students. Therefore, you must use decent equipment. I strongly advise against using the built-in webcam and microphone. Spend some extra cash to get a dedicated webcam and microphone. The quality will be improved significantly. You can see the current Webcam I recommend and use on the Recommended Tools page. The current recommendation has a builtin microphone with noise-canceling.
Software Tools
You can host a live meeting with your students using different software. The most popular applications that are designed for online web conferences are:
- Skype
- Google Meet
- Zoom
- BigBlueButtonBN (integrated into LMS Moodle)
Meeting Guidelines
The key to a well run live training session is some quick rules that will ensure everyone enjoys the session and what you are trying to teach gets conveyed to students. I have run many online Web Conferences and full Virtual Classrooms and here are some of the tricks.
Basic Guidelines for Online Meetings
- Let the students know when and how to ask questions
- Encourage them to chat with each other in the chat feature
- Let them know they can use the group audio on breaks
- Let them know to respect others thoughts in class
- Let them know timings
- What to do when they have technical issues
For more of these tips check out this article:
ARTICLE: 15 Practical Tips for Teaching your First Online Class
Social Learning
Social learning is a method that allows students to learn from their peers. During online classes, this can be achieved using a wide variety of software tools, such as:
- Forums
- Live Chats
- Text
- Audio
- Video
You can learn more about social learning and its advantages by reading the following article:
ARTICLE: Engaging Students Online with Social Learning
Forums
Forums can be successfully used when your students are living in different countries and are in different time zones. It takes a lot of work to ensure all forum questions are answered in a timely manner and that the content remains current the bigger it gets.
It can be also painful looking for an answer as a student due to it being time-consuming and the answer is not guaranteed to be right. If you encourage your students to engage in global or industry forums maybe give them guidelines on how they should be used. If you build one into your Learning Management System (LMS) at least you have full control and the topics are strictly related to what you are doing.
The most well-known forums you can ask your students to join are:
Live Chats
Apart from being a great method to bring all your students together, live chats are a great social opportunity as well. There are various options when it comes to hosting a live chat room. Those possibilities are classified by the main type of communication.
Text
Text chats are better than forums and allow students to discuss current topics in the course. There are tools like the phone app tools located below where students can start their own study groups and ask each other questions. You can also have some that the teachers are involved in as well.
The most popular live text chat room software solutions are:
Audio
Group audio chats require a little more organizing to schedule them so everyone is there but they are great for teamwork when students are regionally separated. They allow things to be organized a lot quicker than they would with a chat and it is more personal hearing each of the students and the teacher if they are involved.
The most commonly used applications for live audio chats are:
Video
Web conferences are the greatest way to connect your students and allow them to exchange ideas, thoughts, and opinions. This type of scheduled meeting has amazing benefits for your students. Their engagement in classes that involve them will significantly increase. As well as video conferencing they can share their computer desktops and use the shared whiteboard and text chat.
The best applications that provide audio-video capabilities for online conferences are:
Assign Interactive Tasks
One effective way to make sure your students do not lose their interest in your course is to get rid of the boring assignments. Whether you choose online or offline assignments you can mix things up for your students so every assignment is not just another 3000-word essay.
To increase engagement and student buy-in you can provide them with assignments they are excited to do. If you are not that creative I have prepared a list with the best 27 interactive assignment ideas for online students that you can read.
Divide The Course Into Shorter Lessons
We all know teachers love the sound of their own voice right? Well, at least that is why I am a teacher. When in all seriousness we need to keep our training short and to the point. We have gone from lessons that are hours long, to one hour, then to 30 mins, and now to 15 mins or microlearning.
The concept is to pack in everything they need into small sessions they can do on the train or on a break at work. It also allows time to think about each concept or topic and then move on to the next one when we are ready. I have not seen many courses that have not been broken down in this way. This also allows students to cherry-pick what they want to learn when they need it. So just in time learning.
MIT Research revealed that the most effective length for educational videos is under six minutes. You know what that means. Cut your one-hour-long training video into several (up to 10) shorter lessons.
To learn more about the best course length and how you should optimize your classes, check out the following article:
ARTICLE: How Long Should an Online Lecture Be?
Include Real-World Equipment
With technology getting smaller why not build into your course some real-world equipment that is small enough for you to ship to them or they can buy online or locally to them. If you are teaching programming use an Arduino circuit board. If it is cooking get them to record themselves backing a cake. You get the idea.
What if the equipment is too big to send to the students or is too expensive for them to buy. Simple, just buy it yourself and set it up for remote access with a schedule students can book into use across the web. Place a few cameras they can use to see what is happening and add a little automation equipment if required for them to interact with it.
The more students get a chance to touch and feel things they more certain types of learners will engage and the better information is retained when using multiple of our senses.
Use Competitions With Rewards
Who doesn’t like the thrill of matching wits with other students in competition with the chance of a real reward at the end of it? Cash is always a great reward but quickly forgotten. You should provide the students with experiences instead that they will remember forever.
You can have simple competitions like the first 3 students to complete up to a certain part of the training or the first to solve a problem. For these simple competitions, you can give gift cards. Then group competitions for major projects. Maybe for the best project and another for the most creative.
For the bigger competitions maybe a jet boat ride for the team or concert tickets or any other bigger price items that provide real experience. New laptops or tablets are a very cheap option these days as well as smartwatches.
Flip Your Classroom
The concept of ‘flipped classroom’ has become quite popular. Students learn the material online self-paced and lecture times and tutorial times are combined into a single session to discuss what they have learned. This is generally led by the professor instead of by a teaching aid. You can do that online with web conferences.
Include Gamification
From simple games built inside your eLearning package software tools and simple quizzes to real games built as independent software or with tools like Flash or in an HTML5 canvas tag. It is ok if you don’t know what either of those areas the software products we use for eLearning handles all of the technical stuff for us.
While not a content type but more a concept, the idea of gamification or adding game-like elements to your training is another option. There have been some very successful educational gaming apps like DuoLingo as a free version and lots of paid versions as well. Simple games or interactivity can be added with your eLearning packaging software and tools.
What people generally include are leader boards with badges and points but you can go way further if you want too.
