By: Sharon Santiago – September 17, 2020
You may be teaching online for some time and are now contemplating how to make your class engaging. Covid-19 has ushered the interactive, rehabilitative, and stress-informed approach in learning to a greater priority. The threat was so life-changing that sometimes, even a brief check-in break makes a big difference toward settling the high-stress levels and isolation experiences.
With that, any steps you take to make your online classes more engaging, supportive, and relational are important. All these functions are essential, from how you deliver your classes to the daily interactions you make with your students. Essentially, meaningful innovation through online learning requires that you adapt to certain changes. Along with that change is the challenge on how to make your online class engaging. But what does an engaging online class look like?
Here are a few helpful tips on how to create a more connected, interactive stress-reducing and engaging online class for your students
1. Know Your Audience
It is beneficial to know your learners before setting up an online class. Organize a get-together, maybe three days before the class, connect with the learner, and get to know their perspectives, expectations, and wants and gauge their behaviors.
If it’s not possible to schedule a meeting in-person, an online session to communicate with them would be the best option. This way, before developing and implementing each lesson plan, you would consider the learner taking the class and establish the learning goals based on their observed behaviors, perspective, attitudes, and most especially needs that you’ve learned straight from them.
2. Prepare A Warm Space
When you’ve known your audience, the next step is to set up your virtual classroom. Professionals in the framework of human neuropsychology and trauma-informed procedures validate that learners are more eager to learn once they’re physically and emotionally organized, feel more connected to others, and get opportunities for effective engagements.
Aside from that, your heartily identified physical presence gives your learners their needed support. Thus, engage effectively, and communicate in a friendly and relaxed tone. Arrange your physical space and make sure that it’s warmly lit, and your face can be easily seen.
Note that online tutorials appeal less personally than the physical classroom, so try sharing something from your daily existence, like pictures of your family, a best-loved pet, a painting, or items representing your hobbies and interests.
Avoid focusing mostly on presentations and video clips when delivering a lesson online. It tends to shift learners’ attention away from the material. The reason behind that is due in part to the fact that the periods that they’re away from a human face it drains their energy and engagement, thereby undermining the sense of connectivity that you are attempting to develop.
3. Let Learners Choose The Way
Let the learners choose what to learn by giving them the freedom to select topics. Doing so will allow them to immediately pick up valuable content and get actively engaged in the learning process.
Where practicable, learners can be steered along the learning journey with guidelines or mandatory units, but allowing them to choose what and how they learn values the topic and involves the learner.
4. Check-in With Your Learner’s Regularly
An engaging approach towards learning is more than a non – judgmental way of responding to the current trends; it is a mechanism of creating a positive learning environment that starts at the outset of each learning session.
In starting your lesson, try to slow down, taking some mindful breaths. Set the learner’s engaging mood by sharing positive messages, like a motivating quote, music, or pictures. Always assess your learners on what they need so they’ll feel like they’re involved and engaged.
Keep providing approaches for learners to give feedback. Maybe they’d want to impart something, like their pets at home, or unlock difficulties before they proceed to the lesson.
Build on regular engagement opportunities throughout your lesson. For example, ask for a thumbs up, a smiley, or one-word response in your chat window or the live class. Take a pause and encourage learners to pitch in if they have some difficulties or find the lesson too complicated. Check-ins don’t have to be lengthy and extensive for it to be effective.
End your learning session with something reflective. Learners should speak about what they’ve learned and express several words of gratitude. Doing this will create a sense of achievement and satisfaction that they’ve done something for the day.
5. Add Fun Graphical Elements
Besides regular check-ins, it’s also good to note that it would be boring to let your learners scroll through plain text slides throughout your class. Why not introduce or incorporate something fun, such as images, short movie clips, memes, jokes, etc. You can also use fun timers in setting the countdown when the learner practices solving Mathematics problems.
6. Be A Storyteller
You might have been bored with being advised to be a storyteller as an educator — it’s been a catchword for ads in the last few years. Yet, storytelling has lasting appeal, and learners enjoy good stories and particularly love to hear or read stories.
Stories connect into thoughts and feelings, so learners’ apt to recall data provided through stories. For your online class, give stories (or case analysis) to read, or have learners watch somebody narrate a story about how they utilized a concept or experience in real life. Employ stories to demonstrate the significance of the discipline they’re learning — an additional motivating factor.
Don’t neglect the added significance of using a video. A gimmicky clip of students and a teacher staging a story may stir up a few unasked laughs, but the point is made and understood.
Even so, by halting the plot, have the learner involved and figure out what they’d be doing in the hero’s role. Or present the same story through alternative perspectives, if somehow the learning outcome is significant. Stories are also good opportunities to build your path to your next topic or the next online session.
7. Have Interactive Weekly Quizzes
Another task associated with an online class is to evaluate or test learners while monitoring them from your desk remotely. In line with making your class engaging, your assessments included, try to use enjoyable quizzes. Such fun quizzes will start making things exciting and hold the students focused.
Getting a regular quiz allows learners to review and keep in line with the lessons constantly. Turning a test into some game makes studying for the learners quick and enjoyable.
8. Motivate Students With Rewards
Learners always want to be recognized for their hard work and consistency. Such encouragement pushes them to go further the next time around. Consistent and positive feedback keeps learners on their toes and fosters healthy competition.
For starters, you can keep a top 5 achievers leaderboard online after each test, and the scores are displayed on the side panel during the tutorials. This inspires learners to perform on their assessments well enough.
9. Ask For Feedback
Ask for inputs; every review from learners is an excellent opportunity for engagement. The way you react to the feedback may have several other benefits in optimizing learning programs to make them more effective and relevant.
10. Make It Social
On top of feedback, social functions like communicating and commenting on views are the product of the mechanism that most citizens engage with. Making your lessons sociable, combined with game elements, makes each lesson even more entertaining. It is a lot of fun for the learners too.
11. Invite Learners To Contribute
A further form of engaging learners is to have them share their knowledge and make resources or organize online community study sessions. Task-based learning will offer a true, meaningful result to the learners. Such outcomes can then be communicated with other learners in their earlier learning phase to encourage them and assist with their learning.
12. Encourage Peer Evaluation
Peer evaluation is another classroom strategy that turns out a treat in online tutorials. This technique enables learners to study each other’s work, improves their comprehension of what they are doing, and fosters a sharing culture that can promote best approaches.
13. Focus On The Positive
Finally, take time to focus on and exploit our “new normal” positive aspects. Most teachers claim an improved degree of association with parents and learners. Learner’s support sessions can be easier to arrange online. Parent-teacher workshops have seen more involvement, and school leaders find social and emotional wellbeing a focus.
Preparing for the future is difficult without understanding what it’ll be. The best way to prepare for the unexpected is to take care of the relationships we have and how well we understand one another and trust each other.
With that, as much as possible, try not to mention or incorporate any negative concepts in your online class. Adapt optimism and focus on the bright and cheerful side.
Wrapping Up
The learner’s engagement in the online learning system is one factor that guarantees their effective learning. With engaging learning methodologies, learners are guaranteed but to engage and play an active part in studying.
Indeed, making your online class engaging can be a cumbersome task. Support and ample resources are essential for an effective and engaging online learning session. Working with a stable and well-rounded company equipped with sophisticated resources and a reliable platform can take some of the burden off your shoulder.
As the first end-to-end online learning platform that connects tutors to learners, Chalkboard opens opportunities for tutors. Backed with a secured platform and trustworthy all-Filipino company, you’ll be a part of a community that roots for its members and provides help when needed. Contact us and be part of our growing community.
