“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
Carl Rogers
The benefits of online learning are numerous and well-documented. Flexibility and convenience, personalized learning experiences, diverse course offerings, cost-effectiveness, and removal of geographical barriers are all at the top of the list of benefits, and the list continues to grow as we find more innovative ways to deliver quality content to our students. There are still those that doubt the effectiveness of online learning, still the online sectors have grown about 90% since the 2000s, and organizations continue to adopt online learning as a strategy faster and faster as time passes. The e-learning industry is expected to be worth $460 billion by 2026, so the train has most definitely left the station.
Now, those benefits don’t just happen without some effort, and there are most definitely pitfalls to avoid in the online learning platform, many of which are caused by a heavy passive learning model. Taking a course and simply “putting it online” is not a recipe for success. But, if we change how we look at the format and focus on implementing engagement in our courses, we develop an ecosystem where learners can partner with us to enhance their mastery of the topics we’re presenting.
Remember that teacher you had in high school that everyone loved? Remember why everyone wanted to take the course(s) they were teaching? It’s because that teacher found ways to foster engagement in their classes, not just traditional learning.
So, how do we build engagement in our online courses?
Incorporate Active Learning Strategies
An active learning strategy is comprised of tasks or assignments that invite students to take a more functional role in their learning rather than passively receiving course content. So, rather than watching a lecture or reading content before completing an assessment, students are engaging in group discussion forums, completing team assignments that encourage them to work with each other to achieve objectives, or even constructing a reflection journal at the end of each segment of the course to identify the areas of content that were most meaningful or most challenging to them. Some good examples of active learning are:
Problem Solving
If you’re teaching a process or workflow, insert a breakdown in the process and have students work to identify the root cause and the resolution of the breakdown. If you’re teaching a theory, present examples where practical application falls outside the theory and ask students to explain WHY there was a deviation. Find ways to have students solve problems, and you have encouraged them to look at the subject matter differently and go beyond the what of the content.
Peer-To-Peer Review
Before submitting an assignment, have your students schedule a peer review of their work with one or more classmates. By doing so, you’ve automatically exposed them to differing viewpoints on the topic(s) at hand and allowed them to see their mastery of the topic(s) through another set of eyes. In an online, asynchronous format, this method also promotes students learning from one another, which is another excellent active learning strategy.
Critical Thinking
Promoting analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content is an effective way to build active learning into your course, and that’s exactly what’s introduced when students employ the process of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the act of gathering facts, evaluating options, and forming conclusions about a topic or problem. It’s quite a relevant method of getting students away from simply absorbing content. It also allows them to:
- Question assumptions
- Make better decisions
- Exercise curiosity
- Create compelling arguments
A great way to introduce critical thinking is to present a case study on the topic you’re teaching and have students analyze the study according to criteria that you set…or maybe they set their own criteria based on other sources? Either way, you’ve taken them out of passive mode and into active mode.
Don’t Rely on the “Read and Regurgitate” Model
Discussion forums are great, but they lean heavily on a simple rehashing of topics. Granted, some really well-constructed discussion topics support a more active model, but you’re still only asking students to read and absorb. Why not go above and beyond and record video lectures or micro-lectures introducing additional viewpoints outside the required text? Why not try recording a podcast that you can publish to the course, and perhaps have a guest from the industry or a colleague join you? Find a TED Talk relevant to your topic and have students view and analyze? Plenty of tools like 7taps or Articulate allow you to create quick and easy micro lessons with built-in assessments.
There are many opportunities to introduce content to your students without asking them to absorb and regurgitate hundreds of pages of reading each week. So get creative and show them a variety of ways to engage actively.
Build Collaboration Into Your Activities
Collaboration, particularly in a virtual environment, is a skill that is a must-have for most industries today. The work-from-home model has shown a staying power through years of adversity, so providing your students with opportunities to work with other to achieve objectives, solve problems, learn from one another, and achieve great things will not only enhance the engagement level of your course, but it will also create connections to your content that don’t exist when students work on their own.
Set up collaborative assignments where students work together to submit. Ask them to collaborate on a recorded group presentation, or have them each be accountable for learning a topic and teaching it to their teammates (my favorite). Build scenarios and script those scenarios, but don’t have the students “spill the beans” about their role until you’re ready for them to play out the scenario (my second favorite).
Find Ways to Connect the Topics to Real-World Applications
If you’re a subject matter expert in the topics you’re teaching, you’ve most likely had real-world experiences that make great examples for your students…so use those experiences to let them see how what they’re learning will apply to what they’ll be doing. If you have a connection to one of the topics, share that personal connection. Perhaps you’re teaching conflict management and you utilize a real conflict-driven scenario you’ve experienced to enhance the theory or practice of the content. Perhaps you subscribe to a trade journal or a newsletter with an article closely related to your topic. Introduce it as a timely reminder that what you’re teaching has real-world applications. If you’re teaching a theory, present real-world scenarios in which your students can apply the theory in practice to solve problems.
You can even use local or global events to make these connections. At the time the COVID-19 pandemic came to a head in March of 2020, the topic I was teaching was “Challenges Presented to Project Managers in a Virtual Environment.” You can bet that I was able to introduce real-world application to the theoretical challenges I was presenting to my students at that particular moment!
Make connections, and your content will jump off the page and into your course!
Be Present in the Course
This one can seem to be the most obvious of the strategies to boost engagement, but it’s also the one that I see miss the mark in many places. Suppose the only time your students hear from you is when you’re instructing them on the week’s topics and assignments, or when you’re providing them feedback on their work, or when you’re sending a course announcement to the masses to talk about a policy. In that case, you’re not really connecting to them…you’re facilitating.
So be present in your course. Check in regularly with your students to see where they might be challenged, promote your virtual office hours, schedule regular live, interactive question and answer sessions, send surveys to your class asking for feedback on topics, assignments, course pace, etc., stay involved in the discussions as if you were taking the course yourself, attend collaborative sessions as if you were a teammate/classmate…the possibilities are endless.
Students should see that you are present in the course and that you’re not just there to assess their work. While assessment is a big part of your role, your presence will drive engagement.
In Conclusion
These are just some of the methods that have proven successful in increasing engagement levels in the courses I’ve created. I would love to hear from you as to what has worked in your courses to engage students further.
