How do you keep students engaged in Your Online Classes

The online courses can be extremely versatile and can be a powerful instrument for many businesses. Bloggers can offer courses on cooking, organizing and crafting, as well as interior design. Accounting firms could offer classes on budgeting and taxation. Online music stores could sell virtual guitar classes in addition to their sheets of music and other instruments.

No matter what kind of course you offer the importance of student participation is paramount. Engaged, enthusiastic learners take your classes, enroll for additional ones, leave good reviews, and recommend your company to their peers.

Let's look at some actionable ways to make your classes more enjoyable.

1. Break your courses into digestible pieces

Our attention spans aren't too large. Studies report varying lengths of time, but most agree that the adult attention span is around 20 minutes.

It's possible that you have high-quality and interesting material to make hours worth of curriculum -- that's great! But your students may not be able take part for that length of time at one duration.

A great method to deal with this is to divide the courses down into smaller chunks using sub-categories and categories. As an example, if you're selling a course on beginning solids for infants, you might divide it into sub-categories such as:

• The introduction to solids
• How do you know when to begin eating solid food?
• Signs of preparedness
• Necessary equipment and gear
• First feeding schedule
• First-rate food items to try
• How to cut and prep
• Example recipes
• Introducing allergens
• Common food allergens
• Signs to be aware of
• Tips for serving allergens

Every grouping could contain texts, images video, or other sources. Students can finish them according to their own schedulesregardless of whether they wish to work on one piece at a time or take a seat and read through them all in one go.

Sensei LMS calls these categories Courses, Modules, and Lessons. You can divide each Course into any number of Modules, then split each Module into several Lessons.

This makes the navigation process super simple for students, and lets them quickly see what's coming up throughout the course.

2. Design effective images

Graphics are a efficient way to connect with your students. Approximately 65% of the general population are visual learners, so not only do images add interest to your courses, they can also help convey concepts more effectively.

There are lots of ways to incorporate images into your classes. If you're listing data in numerical form and you want to include charts or a graph to represent that data. If you're comparing the difference between two components, add photos of them side-by-side. If you're talking about a particular type of houseplant, add pictures.

In creating graphics, or selecting images, remember a few basic tips:

• Make sure you choose high-quality photos. Although you do not have to hire a professional photographer, make sure the photos you purchase or shoot look professional. The subject should be crystal clearand no blurry images! And the lighting must make the photo easy to consume.
• Think of empty white spaces. White space is the empty space around the content of the image. So if you have text lines or a pie charts, it is important to create enough empty area around it to allow the graphic to breath. It helps the viewer better absorb the information contained in your graph and comprehend its significance.
• Use photos of individuals, when appropriate. Humans are wired to respond to people's faces and our attention naturally shifts towards them. The addition of photos that feature a friendly face can aid in connecting people to you and your subject matter.
• Don't get too complicated. Don't add a ton of pictures that clash against one another as well as the educational content of your lessons. Be aware that the images you use will be used to attract the attention of your viewers, to make it more engaging, and aid in the process of learning. Sometimes, simplicity is best.

3. Appeal to a variety types of learners

Everyone learns differently. Actually, there's many learning styles, and if you are looking to reach as many students as possible, you'll be able to appeal to them all whenever you can. The following are the most commonly used, and how to meet the requirements of every type of student:

• Read/write Students benefit from learning with words. Write down instructions in writing and provide instructions for them within the pages of the course or as PDFs that are downloadable.
• Visual Images, graphics, and videos are perfect for this type of student. Actually, in one study, viewers remembered 95% of a message after watching a video, compared to just 10% while reading the content. Video can be a effective method of teaching on the internet.
• Auditory: These types of learners are more likely to absorb information through listening and speaking. This is why you may provide videos of yourself explaining ideas that your students could take in. Also, you can provide access to a podcast in your classes, have a weekly Zoom meeting that allows an individual discussion, or integrate songs into your classes.
• Kinesthetic: These students learn through hands-on experiences, and benefit from physically learning things by themselves. Even though this can be challenging to incorporate into online education, be creative! Give students sewing patterns to try out, give them a list of photos they have to capture for the next week, or ask students with designing their own logos.

Let's say you sell on-line cooking courses. If you want to cater to the four different learning styles in one course You could have multiple paragraphs on the principles of making bread rise. You could include an infographic detailing the science involved, feature a video of you demonstrating how to explain the basic principles and give students the job of making their own loaf of bread.

4. Make sure you have a convincing Narrator

If you're making videos for your courses, an effective narrator can be a huge distinction. If you're fond of audiobooks, then you understand this concept. A boring, flat voiceover can send listeners right to sleep. On the other hand, a voiceover with a personality that's interesting and engaging is the exact opposite.

The narration you use reflects the tone of the course. Is your topic fun and enjoyable? Sensitive and serious? Relevant and helpful? Your videos should reflect that.

Be sure to set the pace of your narration perfect and also. It can be easy to speak too fast in your voiceovers, which can cause it to be difficult for students to keep up. Review your recorded recordings and, if your voice is too fast, start over.

Do not try to sound like your favorite voiceover artist. It's not possible be able to impersonate Morgan Freeman no matter how hard you try and that's not what students are looking for. Simply be you!

If this isn't your strong suit then that's fine. There are professional voiceover talents available to hire which don't cost you an arm and a leg.

5. Incorporate polls, quizzes and other questions.

Questions and polls can be a great option to gauge the amount your students are absorbing and learning about and get them involved at a higher degree. They can also help break up your content with things that are fun and interesting.

You could also start each lesson with a questionnaire. The poll can be used to solicit questions to help instruct students or invite them to talk about something fun about themselves. What can they expect to learn from your course? What's their biggest accounting pain point? Which song is their most listened to? How many cakes have they prepared?

Then, mix in questions throughout your class. With Sensei LMS, quizzes are associated with lessons. So you can create questions in response to the lessons that a student just completed. Combining different types of questions like multiple choice false/true and fill-in the blank, short answer and so on. It can keep the conversation interesting.

There is the option of setting question types like multiple choice and true/false that will be graded automatically as well as manually grade open-ended and non-sequential questions by your self. It gives you the chance to find areas of improvement for your courses, and reach out to any students that might require a bit of assistance.

6. Build a community

One of the major distinctions between physical and online learning environments is the community engaged. Students taking online classes aren't able to sit alongside other students taking the same class and discussing the subject with them as well as asking questions in front of them.

It is possible to create an identical setting by establishing an online community, either on a social media platform such as Facebook or by using an WordPress plugin like the bbPress plugin. The topics can be divided in modules or lessons, or base them off the characteristics of your students (like age of the children, where they live, or what instruments they're studying). They give them an opportunity to talk about topics with one another to brainstorm ideas, pose clarifying questions, or even build friendships that encourage learners to learn.

7. Incorporate gamification

Gamification applies the principles of game playing -- like point scoring and competition -and other forms of communication such as online education. It is an excellent opportunity to be creative! Here are a few ideas:

• Incorporate quizzes, challenges and other activities into your lessons
• Points awarded based on the performance of students such as completing assignments, scoring well on quizzes, etc. The award will include a prize for the student who scores the highest amount of points.
• Encourage students to participate in your forum with badges
• Add a progression bar to your courses in order to encourage students to complete the course
• Students should publish their marks via social media

Gamification can make learning fun and encourages healthy competition, making your lessons more interesting to students.

8. Learn what your customers are looking for

The absolute most effective method to make your classes engaging for your students is to give them what they're looking for. If you answer their questions and help them meet their goals, they're more likely to be able to finish your course, leave a good review, and then recommend it to acquaintances and relatives.

You can then adjust your program's contents and structure in order to satisfy their expectations.

It's all about your students

When it comes down to it, your students online are the core of everything you create. And if you keep the needs of your students in mind when crafting your course content and arranging your courses will be able to keep them engaged, interested and committed to buying more.

Want more tips? Read this article by Sensei LMS on creating effective online courses.