The digital generation practically lives online, so it’s natural it be educated online as well, well partially at least. Obviously, online learning is seeing great success and has fascinated both educators and students enrolled in higher education with its potential to engage students in context-based content and enabling them to personalize their learning process.
Online learning is all about engaging and empowering students. Boring, rarely updated, and poor-quality content of traditional media, like printed books, no longer satiates the academic appetite of today’s students, who can leverage easily accessible digital tools to enhance their learning and add real-world relevancy to their studies.
While discussing online learning environments, especially for higher education, student engagement is perhaps the single most important factor contributing towards the success of students, departments/programs, courses, and institutions.
Engaging students in a non-physical environment can be a challenge, but there are some keys you can follow to engage students online. They are:
Mentoring Rather than Teaching
The advent of digital tools and online educational resources has essentially changed the very dynamic of the student-teacher relationship. Students need to be guided today, not taught because they have the tools, the resources a click away. That’s why teachers today need to act more as mentors and facilitators helping students wade through the rigors of the curriculum, especially in online modalities. But because there are so many exciting tools available to today’s students, it becomes even more exciting and challenging for a mentor to find creative ways to keep them enthralled about the coursework. And of course, there are tools to help teachers too.
Developing an Online Learning Community
Developing a learning community is considered the most powerful key to engaging students in the learning process. Holding discussions and taking on group assignments through learning communities enable much needed social interaction and help connecting students and the educator. Besides, these learning communities can be used as a platform where adult learners can share their opinions and experiences. Such communities increase students’ retention as well as enhance their academic achievement.
Encouraging Participation
Students should be regularly informed about when they need to be present in the online classroom. A participation framework should be created to encourage students to join the classroom at regular intervals and be actively involved in all that is being discussed in online classrooms.
Engaging Through Interactivity
Interactivity plays a vital role in engaging and motivating students in online learning. Well-crafted educational games easily draw learners and help them to fulfil their intrinsic desire to find solutions to different problems in a playful manner.
Case studies are also helpful tools in online teaching and learning. Educators, by crafting case studies based on real-world scenarios, can effectively boost student engagement in the courses or subjects. Instructors can ask students questions, such as how they would respond to the situation mentioned in the case study, making them competitive in handling real-life situations appropriately.
Engaging Through Debates
Conducting online debates is another excellent way to engage students. Educators can direct students to read a case study or article that can be used as a topic of debate and can also provide them how the directions in which the debate will be moderated. The students can be asked to write a position paper on the topic to defend their chosen viewpoints. These position papers can be uploaded online for peer review and further discussions.
Integrating Social Media with Education
Social media is a great way to share knowledge. Educators can use social media effectively to share anything from deadlines of assignments to the list of student grades. They can encourage students to use social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook for educational purposes. Through these sites, students get a chance to discuss further study opportunities and various other things with students worldwide. Also, students can use recruitment related websites, such as LinkedIn to explore internships opportunities and to get connected with the industry experts.
Online education affords unprecedented accessibility, interactivity, and engagement for students, but it is also changing the roles of teachers (and other stakeholders) to facilitators and faster this transition happens, the smoother will be the road to a better, more informed, more skilled future.
