Despite the growing popularity of online courses and the market in general, not all online courses can hold students’ attention for long. According to the reports, the average dropout rate of online courses fluctuates between 50-70%, meaning that at least half of your students won’t ever finish them.
So, how do you avoid that and make your online courses more popular? By creating an engagement strategy that will keep your students entertained and participating. The tips below could be a perfect starting point for that.
#1 Keep your course organized
A clear and comprehensive structure helps your students understand what they can expect from each lesson. Make sure to use bullet points and color-coding to highlight the important topics. Plus, be consistent with your formatting. First, it helps your students navigate the course more easily. Second, it adds pro points to the visual appeal and makes your course look more presentable.
What’s more, adding visual cues, like progress bars, time codes, and grades will help your students to browse through the course and showcase things they need to work on or prioritize. That actually has something to do with our next stop.
#2 Support your lessons with visuals
The impact of visuals on the overall online course retention. (Source)
The human brain processes visuals much faster than texts. By incorporating images, graphs, and charts into your lessons, you increase the overall information retention while making the course more appealing.
Make sure your illustrations are easy to understand and support the statements you deliver. You can also use short clips — up to three minutes — to cover trivia. Videos are an excellent tool for engagement with the topic and provide just the right amount of visual content for learning.
#3 Offer omnichannel support throughout the course
Staying in touch with your students and lending a hand where necessary helps them stay motivated and involved in the learning process. Given that 51% of students complete at least some of their course activities via mobile device, you might want to use cross-platform apps to reach out to your students.
However, instead of creating independent communication channels, which takes a lot of effort, you can switch to omnichannel support with customer service software, like HelpCrunch. Here are only some advantages of using it:
- A shared helpdesk houses live chat, chatbot, email, and messengers (Facebook, Telegram, Instagram) correspondence, so you can connect with your students in real-time without switching between the tabs;
- A no-code, sleek chatbot that answers students’ urgent questions and consults them (by the way, you can set it up in HelpCrunch in a jiffy);
- A well-oiled knowledge base which you can organize at the click of a button stores all the resources needed to complete the course successfully;
#4 Use scenarios and stories
Our brain is more wired to process and remember stories than boring facts. Use this info to your advantage during online courses!
Build each lesson like a story with a plot and tell it from the beginning to the end. You can also add some relatable examples, life situations, and even memes. The goal is to create an emotional hook that will keep your students attentive and engaged.
The impact of storytelling on learning. (Source)
#5 Add interactive elements
Another option to hold your students’ attention span is adding gamification to the course. For instance, a level-up window after successfully completing each module feels like a real reward, thus making your scholar more eager to earn it. Other examples of notifications include leaderboards that display scores, achievements, badges for accuracy or speed, etc.
If you and your class have access to VR devices, feel free to incorporate modern educational technologies into your courses. Focusing on building skills directly in real-time simulations is an incredible tool to keep your students focused and help them learn new things faster.
#6 Keep it inclusive and accessible
The percentage of students with disabilities in school. (Source)
According to the reports, around 20% of all US college students have a disability of some sort, and this number raises to a third among the school students. This means that every fifth person in your class might require specific accommodations for learning. Here’s what you can do:
- Add subtitles to the course videos;
- Prioritize keyboard functionality over the mouse or a touchpad;
- Give your students enough time to read and analyze content;
- Provide ALT descriptions for images and media;
- Help your students correct and avoid mistakes.
#7 Don’t limit yourself to one language
Studies conducted on offline classes show that students who can use their native language instead of English, provide more valuable output. So utilize the same approach to make your online courses accessible to foreign students.
Add multi-language captions to your lessons or hire a voice-over artist who will dub them in another tongue. Consider planning the translations ahead, as it will not only prevent any possible miscommunications, but also help make your courses more engaging to an international audience.
#8 Harvest user’s feedback
Finally, getting feedback from students is one of the most efficient tips for improving your eLearning system. Ask them to review your course after completion and list the pros and cons. Or set up pop-up buttons that allow scholars to rate a particular topic coverage or a video lesson. Take your time to review the feedback and adjust the course according to it. For instance, schedule a once-a-month check for that.
Conclusion
Like with offline learning, the success of online courses depends on how you present information and interact with the students. However, online learning systems give you many opportunities to structure, visualize, and gamify the process. By picking some tips above, you can build your engagement strategy and keep your user passing the final assignments with ease.
Jack Griffiths
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