How do you get your students to tune into your online course? Students often find themselves scrolling through their phones while watching a course video. The newer generation of learners find it harder to focus and stay active with online content. With short videos becoming more and more popular, attracting their attention with long-form content no longer works! As a course creator, you’ll need to find ways to adapt and keep your learners active. Put simply, you have to make your online course more engaging!
Let’s dive into some tips on how course creators can do this!
1. Keep It Organized
As your students go through an online course, they want to feel guided. The structure of your online course can make or break their first impression of it! Bite-sized modules and lessons, carefully organized, are easier to absorb and digest. Long modules and chapters can overwhelm them with too much information all at once. It’s easier for them to lose focus or even get frustrated when they don’t have time to pause and digest important information.
But, if you allow them to take breaks and test their knowledge with an activity or worksheet, then they’ll feel more confident as they go through your course.
2. Short Videos
Have you ever found yourself scrolling through your phone just five minutes into a lengthy lecture? We’ve all done it because, let’s face it, long videos can be a real attention killer! We understand some topics can take more time to discuss, but opt for short videos where possible!
The key is to identify subtopics within the larger topic. Each short video should focus on the subtopics and consider using visual aids and animations to better help students grasp the information.
3. Quizzes and Questions
Strategically place quizzes and questions at the end of each module or chapter. These “checkpoints” serve two powerful purposes.
First, they help your students retain what they just learned. It’s one of the most powerful methods to help reinforce someone’s understanding and memory of a topic. It creates a mental snapshot that helps them capture and store the knowledge they just gained.
Second, it can also redirect them to sections they didn’t quite understand. If they miss too many questions on a quiz, you can easily redirect them to the relevant module or subtopic to help them study it again. Your students will appreciate your effort to really help them learn the course.
4. Enrich With More Resources
These resources can be external links, articles, books, research papers, or even videos! Online students are always going to look for other resources to learn the material, and it would be even better for their experience if you provided some of these yourself!
Doing this allows your students to dive deeper into specific topics, explore new approaches, or simply have more ways to learn the material. It caters to different learning styles and interests!
5. Case Studies
At the end of your online course, it would be helpful to include some case studies where students can apply what they’ve learned in real-world scenarios. This is where education often fails – bridging the gap between theory and practice. So, help your students be better prepared to use what they’ve just learned in real life. This can be a marketing campaign, solving a technical problem, or coding a project. A hands-on task makes the learning experience dynamic and powerful!
As you work on making your online course more engaging, remember to follow these tips, and don’t be scared to mix it up and incorporate new ways to enhance it. We talked about breaking up the course into bite-sized modules, having short animated videos, incorporating quizzes and activities, and even adding a real-world challenge that they can solve at the end!
But the biggest takeaway in all of this is to get your students excited to learn and go through your online course! Making your online course more engaging creates a community of engaged learners who are hungry for the courses you create!
Remember, you don’t have to do this all from scratch! CourseAI’s online course platform helps you build and automate the process of creating an engaging online course complete with quizzes, activities, and even videos! Creating an online course with CourseAI tools is guaranteed to help you succeed as in creating dynamic courses for your students.