Online learning (or eLearning) has opened up some incredible opportunities for students all around the world to study any subject, at any time. Though convenience is one of the main selling points, there can be difficulties in keeping your students engaged throughout the entirety of the course. It takes creativity and thinking outside of the box to accomplish this.
At Archy Learning, we aim to allow anyone to create fun and engaging online courses. We have put together 6 simple ways for you to do this. Let’s go over them in this blog!
Here are the 6 best tips that will help you learn how to make lessons fun and engaging in a virtual classroom:
1) Present quality content
2) Use technology
3) Know your audience
4) Set goals
5) Use gamification
6) Break down the lessons and make them digestible
1) Present quality content
Having good audio and visual content is one of the most important aspects of a successful online course. If your video quality is blurry or pixelated, and your audio keeps cutting out, how can you expect your students to pay attention the entire time?
Ensure when recording, or conducting live classes that you have a good internet connection and a microphone that can provide great audio quality. Ensuring a quality experience for your students will help them stay focused and engaged for longer.
2) Use technology
Leveraging tech into your learning journey is one of the best things you can do! Using elements like screen sharing, virtual mini-games, virtual whiteboards, etc can really help add variety to your courses. Using these will no doubt raise the engagement levels of your course.
Do some research, and look at what other course creators are doing and the tech they are leveraging, and don’t be afraid to add it into your own learning activities. Tech will help liven up your lessons.
3) Know your audience
Knowing your audience and students is great and you should keep this in mind while creating your content. Content for a class of students in middle school would be very different in comparison to content created for adults.
For younger online students, you might want to speak in simpler and more animated ways.
Keep your online classes engaged by giving fun activities that require imagination and creativity. Encourage students to try new things, and measure their progress and engagement throughout the course.
4) Set goals
A way to track and ensure the success of your students’ learnings is to set clear goals and monitor them throughout the course. Let your students see how they are tracking and succeeding as well, as this will help them stay motivated and continue.
Goals should be set throughout the course. Even small victories ensure your students that they are on the path to success. Start with a clear outline of the course and introduce short-term goals throughout it. Provide positive feedback throughout the course as well.
Implementing elements such as quizzes will help you see how your students are learning the content. This can also help you know what you need to revise later.
5) Use gamification
Using gamification in your eLearning is one of the best strategies you can implement. It makes your entire learning pathway more fun, just like a game. You can implement elements such as badges, leaderboards, points, and mini-games.
You can even create different levels of the learning course and create “quests” for your students. They can use these quests as motivators to complete as they travel through and learn all of the content.
Reward your users with points and allow them to show off their scores on a leaderboard. You can even create fun real-life rewards, instead of just digital. Gifts such as gift cards can help motivate your users and create fun competition amongst their peers.
Archy Learning has partnered its LMS with Gamify, allowing users to add gamification elements and mini-games with ease, no coding required! You can even brand them to your business branding guidelines and add in custom content and characters. Make the game look like your very own!
6) Break down the lesson and make it digestible
The general population’s attention span is shrinking, with statistics showing that it has gone down to about 6 seconds. We as course creators need to keep this in mind while creating our course content. Microlearning has proven to be much more effective than having 3 hour-long lectures.
If you break down course content into intervals of about 10-15 minutes, students can achieve more in less time. Not only that, but they’ll actually retain the content better.
Repetition is incredibly important as well. Breaking down concepts and then summarising them helps for memorization. Adding in mini-games in between lessons will help learners with retention rates as well.
Summary
Online learning has opened up brand new opportunities for everyone, allowing for courses to be studied across an array of subjects by anyone with internet access. The quality of online learning has also developed tremendously in the last decade, with technology advancing, online learning can provide a more engaging and fun experience.
You can start by creating your own online course for free, today!
