Naturally, students enrolling in online programs have concerns about losing their family finances, academic plans, and even future. Effective online teaching and learning strategies play an essential role in resolving these problems and building students’ trust in online learning. In this article, several ways are discussed to improve your online courses that will increase students’ knowledge retention and class participation.
Therefore, for all the instructors and trainers offering excellent online courses, the challenge is obvious. They need to design and provide engaging, interactive, well-supported, and up-to-date courses. Here are the simple ways that can help you exceed in online education.
1) Motivate Your Trainees
As we all believe that motivation is the key to effective learning. Thus, the perceptual relevance of the curriculum is the most critical factor that may contribute to motivation. In addition, it is necessary to discuss the course’s benefit, value, and applicability from the beginning. A degree provides an essential foundation for further studies, and it helps students acquire specific skills and deal with particular interest topics. It is an important way to improve your online courses in the next training sessions for better and extraordinary results.
2) Establish Personal Contact with Students
Instead of just introducing yourself, it is better to do a student survey. Then share the results with students when filling in the answers to your questions. Anonymous surveys can provide a wealth of information about the current situation of students. It assists in focusing on the primary concern and planning strategies to improve the online training. It can also help you understand students’ motivations in class, their expectations for the semester, their specific areas of interest, and the types of support they find helpful.
3) Help Learners Stay Focused
A significant factor in student failure in online classrooms is lack of attention. The problem exists in multiple dimensions. Moreover, in the traditional structure of the school day, many students find it difficult to concentrate, set priorities, schedule time, and track progress. Thus it is necessary to give them the essential structure.
The method is as follows: every week, explain the tasks that students need to complete every week. Make sure your instructions are easy to follow. Some students enjoy fulfilling activities, assignments, grades, and different tasks. Other students find it challenging to stay alert when learning online. After all, their attention is limited, and many distractions and obstructions will affect their ability to concentrate or think clearly. So, students must remain focused and alert while attending online classes and completing relevant tasks.
4) Create a Sense of Community
Help students understand each other. Divide a large class into smaller parts. Invite students to participate in ice-breaking activities in small groups. Joint courses also provide opportunities for students to share ideas, knowledge, and experience. The trainee must be available before and after the synchronization session. If students can communicate with you easily, stay online after the live broadcast. Ask questions, comments, and other forms of feedback.
5) Make Your Discussion Meaningful
Whether it is oral discussion, group discussion, or through text, chat, or forum discussion, we must ensure that the debate really helps students’ learning.
Here are some effective ways to improve your online courses.
- Brainstorming sessions allow students to propose different methods for a particular topic or problem.
- In comprehension exercises, students help each other understand a complex topic; it is essential to question specific arguments or explanations.
- Diagnosis, here students analyze problems, and experience sharing activities, where learners share their own experiences or opinions.
6) Deal with Equity Issues
The shift to distance learning has exacerbated equality-related issues. The students’ learning intentions vary greatly. When learning online, please pay attention to students’ challenges. Some students are in different time zones. Many people worry about cheating by their classmates.
Be flexible in your strategies and let students access course resources in various ways, including downloading PowerPoint presentations, watching videos, or taking quizzes on mobile phones. Providing more opportunities for students to earn extra credit points is an effective way to improve your online courses. It also gives guidelines to modify your scoring strategy to include more powerful project-based assignments.
7) Recognize and Support Students with Difficulties
Our students are struggling with the current crisis. Some need academic support; others need technical assistance. Many, perhaps most people, need non-academic assistance. However, many mental health needs remain unmet, while others need to help balance their responsibilities and priorities.
What can you do? You can track their participation. You can conduct regular inspections and proper checkups. When the signal displays that a student is falling behind, you can actively communicate or send an alert. You can also send notifications.
Empathy is rarely so important. Encourage your students. Provide support: rubrics, checklists, sample test answers, background information, and glossaries to your students. Provide some flexibility in timing and revisions, and provide quick feedback.
Conclusion
In this rapidly growing digital society, we must admit that most higher education will consist of online education in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the ways mentioned above are crucial for trainers to help them become successful online instructors.