Online course anxiety is real. Be it teachers or students, everyone has a hard time maintaining their efficiency in online courses. We know teachers asking their colleagues to do my class for me but what we have in store for students? Absolutely nothing. They have to unwind the struggles themselves and make online courses an active and interesting learning space for students. If you are also struggling to grab your students’ attention, following tips are no less than lifesavers for you. You can take benefit of them and improve your online courses.
Get A Robust Internet Connection
The very first thing you need to do to make sure your students are not struggling hard to get to your classroom is finding a sound internet connection. Invest in finding a secure and solid internet so there are no glitches when you are taking online classes. One of the main reasons student lose their interest in online classes is a poor internet connection that leaves everything jammed.
Offer Accessible Study Material
You must present accessible study material to your students so they can easily get hands on the notes and publications they require. Your LMS must be easily to handle and have effortless functions. This will help your students acquire the course material in one go. Otherwise, getting hands on lecture, assessments, etc. can get a lot difficult. This is where most of the students lose their rope and take their steps back. Therefore, make sure all learning material you intend to provide your students is easily accessible and can be found without any hassle.
Foster Students Engagement
To keep your students hooked to your online courses, promote interactions among them and power communications. There is no denying that communication is the key to successful online learning. To see some dramatic improvements in your students’ productivity, host group discussions and online presentations.
Give all your students chance to speak in front of the whole class. This will help enhance their confidence and possibilities are they will be more comfortable sharing their questions and queries. You can also enhance personal communications to have better idea of your students’ progress. How? Send them emails, make a WhatsApp group and go all extra miles that you can to improve your bond with your students.
Hold Constructive Competitions
Competitions for online courses are really fruitful to grab students’ attention and keep them clung to online classes. We know a teacher who had a hard time bringing students to her online classes. Of course there were a few factors leading to this but the major one was lack of communication. We recommended her to hold small competitions and incentivize them. We knew this tactic would work but not as good as she told us. Look what she had to say,
“So, upon your suggestion, I hosted a small competition in my online course and gave all my students topics from their course outline to present. I had mentioned that the winner will get straight 20 marks in their exam. I was expecting maximum of ten students to show up but guess what? The entire class of 35 students participated and I had to choose 2 winners. Since that day, we have already had 3 more contests and I can see some massive benefits popping out.”
Focus More On Struggling Students
Your ranking students might be okay with the regular coursework and prerecorded lectures. However, students who have hard time understanding complex concepts suffer. Such students always feel their teachers are doing favoritism and doesn’t care about their grades. Is that the case for your class too? Please work on changing your students’ perception. This way students lose their confidence and pay even less attention on their courses.
If you really want to help your average learners, pay more attention to them. Become a teacher cum friend and see what areas they are wrestling with. Find out their stressing points and pay a bit of more attention towards them. When your students feel welcomed, they actually work hard and as a result, perform better.
Two Bonus Tips
Below are the two expert recommended tips that have significantly helped teachers improve their online courses.
Make Boring Interesting
Boring lectures and complicated topics are often the reason students pay no focus in online courses and fail their assessments. Disciplines like history, statistics, physics, and sociology are a few domains where students leave their interest midway and teachers have hard time bringing it back.
For such boring subjects and topics, add videos and infographics to your lecture content. Gamification is also a great idea but needs an elder’s assistance. Make sure whatever tactic you use is beneficial to bring your learner to the action. You can try making them instructor for a few minutes too and see how clear their concepts are. The more learning tactics you will bring to the table, the more interesting learning will get.
Get Feedback From Students
Another great tactic to employee in online courses which sadly most of the educationists take no benefit from is seeking feedback from your students. If you are not an experienced teachers, number of chances are that some of your teaching habits are going futile and providing no fruit to your students. Therefore, take a look at what your students have to say about your coaching. This doesn’t only makes online course sessions more interactive but also gives you an idea of what practices you need to keep continuing and what you must drop. Also, this heart to heart feedback from students will break the ice and chances are they’ll easily raise more questions resulting in improved online course results.
Conclusion
Are you still confused what tactics suits you best and what you need to pay no heed to? We have a trick for you. Instead of asking other instructors to do my class for me, apply all these tactics in your online course teaching methods and see which among them is bringing great outcomes for you. Those that are useless can be overlooked but the ones offering benefits are definitely the keepers.
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