Teaching online can be one of the most rewarding careers you’ve ever had, but it can also be very lonely. Unfortunately, there’s a stigma and an assumption that online teaching and education isn’t as good as something that happens in the real world. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Teaching online can be much more interactive for both teachers and learners than traditional means. Here we look at ways we can make teaching online more social, collaborative and enjoyable for everyone involved!
Engaging learners in your online learning program is one of the keys to ensuring they learn effectively and get the most out of what they are doing. One of the most effective ways to make learners more engaged in what they are doing it to make it interactive. With interactive online learning experiences, learners have no option other than to get involved and take an active role in their learning. Here are five simple ways to engage your learners by making your online learning program more interactive.
Your Goal: Unprecedented Engagement!
Successfully shifting from classroom-based teaching to online teaching requires an engagement strategy. After all, if your students aren’t paying attention during your lessons, they won’t be in a position to learn anything. An engaged audience is also an active audience. This results in a vibrant classroom environment and encourages the types of behaviors and results that you would like to see.
With a fun-focused online teaching game plan, all this is possible. The engagement soon turns into motivation and motivation soon turns into a habit. With this in mind, let’s jump into our top 13 tips for how to make lessons fun and engaging online (and how to make online teaching fun as well!).
Tip 1: Pick The Right Tool (& Test It!)
Before you can host your first online class, you’ll need to find a video conferencing tool that enables you to connect with your students. Luckily, you have a variety of options available to you.
Market leaders include Zoom, Webex, Adobe Connect, Google Hangouts, and others. Many of these tools have a free option, although you may require a paid subscription to properly meet the needs of your students.
Regardless of the tool you select, you should take the time to learn how to use it properly. Read the instructions, view the tutorial videos, and test out functionality for yourself. Your goal should be to know the tool well enough to support your students if they have any questions or difficulties.
Tip 2: Send Invites & Clear Instructions
Once you’ve set up the classroom event, you’ll need to get invites out to your students. This is typically done within your video conferencing tool. Your invite should include a rough agenda, joining instructions, and a list of anything your students will need to bring with them.
If they’re expected to be on their webcams or to utilize their microphones during the classroom session, then you should let them know this. This will give them an opportunity to prepare accordingly.
Finally, you should send out a reminder, approximately 15-minutes before the classroom session is scheduled to begin. This will jog their memory and ensure that the joining instructions are readily available to them.
Tip 3: Stay Secure:
COVID-19 has facilitated a bump in online meetings and classroom events. In turn, increased scrutiny has been placed on the security offered by video conferencing tools. Luckily, there are actions you can take to secure your online classroom and ensure it is a safe space for you and your students. We recommend following these steps to keep your online study sessions safe:
- Don’t share meeting invites in public forums.
- Password-protect your meetings.
- Use a ‘Waiting Room’ to control who joins the meeting.
- Make sure you know all participants in the room.
- Ensure you know how to manage (and remove) participants.
Tip 4: Show Your Face
A disembodied voice is not half as engaging as seeing you in action. So turn on your camera and engage directly with your audience. To maintain their attention, you should ensure you are talking directly into your camera. This will help you to stimulate a more personal connection with your students.
But the considerations don’t stop there. Don’t sit too close to the camera. Don’t sit too far away. Find the comfort zone and stick in it. Check the lighting in your room. Ensure the acoustics are good. It shouldn’t look like you’re broadcasting from a dingy basement or a messy room. If you can remove distractions like these, you’ll help your students to apply their focus in the right way.
Tip 5: Set Ground Rules
Successful online classrooms require a teaching strategy. This means you need a clear structure and structure requires rules. Having clear ground rules sets expectations for your students and encourages them to take your classroom event seriously.
These rules should help to limit unnecessary interruptions and distractions, ensure a safe learning environment and provide equal opportunities for all to participate.
You should discuss online etiquette with your students and make your expectations clear. How should they ask questions? Should they be on ‘mute’ whilst they are listening? Are they allowed to use the ‘Chat’ functionality? If so, what limitations will you place upon it?
We recommend writing up a list of ground rules and running through them at the start of every classroom session.
Tip 6: Follow Microlearning Principles
No matter how good a teacher you are, you can only maintain a student’s attention span for a certain amount of time. Child development experts note that attention spans vary depending on the age of the audience.
For instance, 6-year-olds can pay attention to a subject for 12 to 18 minutes. On the other hand, 12-year-olds can pay attention for 24 to 36 minutes. Consider your audience and bear this in mind when creating your lesson plan.
To help better support your students stay focused, we recommend the following microlearning principles. This requires chunking up your content into small focused bursts that can be consumed quickly. Think about how you can break large topics down into their smaller constituent parts. Then think about how you plan to communicate each element.
Try to vary the medium wherever possible to maintain engagement. Fun online classes require variety. For instance, you might start by introducing the concept, then play a video, then solicit questions before conducting a breakout group session and finishing with a quiz.
Tip 7: Record Your Lessons
Here’s a simple, practical piece of advice: record your online classroom sessions. These recordings are useful for a number of reasons. For example, there will be occasions when one or more of your students are unable to attend. Whilst this is not ideal, they will at least be able to catch up with the session in their own time by viewing the recording.
What’s more, these recordings may prove to be useful resources. When they need to study, your students may dip back into your lessons in order to recap certain topics. You could also watch the recordings to help critique your own technique or approach.
Doing this may also help to uncover things you’ve missed. Perhaps there were students who didn’t get their questions answered. Now you can take the opportunity to respond outside of the class.
Tip 8: Check-in Periodically
You should check in with your students on a regular basis, just as you would in a physical classroom. Take care to ensure your audience understands what’s been covered so far. Ask some challenging questions. Solicit further questions from them.
It’s important to ensure students don’t get left behind in the online learning world. Equally, it’s important to establish what your students should do, if they feel they don’t fully understand any part of your lesson.
Many video conferencing tools offer some type of polling functionality. We recommend using this to determine your audience’s level of knowledge on a particular topic, before moving on to the next item you have to cover.
Tip 9: Monitor The Chat
Many video conferencing tools also offer a social media-esque ‘Chat’ area, where participants can communicate with each other. You should first decide whether this functionality will be used within your online classes. Following that, you should set some clear guidelines on how it should be used.
Ask your students to use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Make it clear that inflammatory or disrespectful language will not be tolerated. With these rules in mind, check the ‘Chat’ area on a regular basis. It can be a great way to monitor the temperature of the room, solicit questions from your audience and check their knowledge.
Ask for feedback
Any chance the learners have to leave feedback is a great opportunity for interaction. How we respond to the feedback can also have other advantages for streamlining programs and making them more relevant.
Let people choose the way
Giving the learner the choice of where to start in a selection of topics and units allows them to pick out relevant content instantly and become engaged in the program. The can be guided along the learning path with recommendations or some compulsory units if necessary, but letting them choose the order in which they learn topics empowers and engages the learner.
Make it social
Social functions such as sharing and commenting on content are part of the way most of us are used to communicating. Combined with gamification, this makes any course more interactive. It’s a lot of fun for the learners, too.
Invite learners to contribute
Having the learners contribute their knowledge by making resources or hosting online group study sessions is another way to empower them. Task-based learning can provide the learners with a real, relevant outcome which can be shared with other learners who are earlier in their learner journey to inspire them and help with their studies.
Encourage peer evaluation
A classic classroom technique that works a treat online. Enabling learners to review each other’s work reinforces their understanding of what they are doing and encourages a culture of sharing which can be valuable in spreading best-practice.
Conclusion
Few organizations are able to offer ongoing professional development for their staff. Those that do utilize in-person meetings or workshop training to share knowledge and skills . However, not all companies have the time or resources to invest in ongoing training. That’s where online training programs can help to improve employee skills and save companies money at the same time. Below are 5 tips on how to make your online training sessions more interactive.