Strategies to Facilitate Student Engagement Online

 Hello everyone! And today’s blog post I will be talking about ways to keep students engaged in an online learning environment.

Here are five different strategies one can use while teaching online;

1. The first tool to keeping students engaged and to facilitate that engagement, while learning online, is by being present as the teacher. This seems as a very small thing, but in reality, it’s very important for you as a teacher to have an open door policy and try and create an environment where you can be available to your students, and through this helpfulness, your students, will become more and more motivated to continue to communicate, whenever they need to.

2. The second way to facilitate student engagement while online is to keep the educational materials in the curriculum as interesting as possible. Like the first strategy, this also seems like a basic and small thing to do but when your work is not interesting and you just give your students basic style notes, and, make everything plain, your students are not gonna be excited to get their work done, and therefore will become less engaged with the curriculum. 

3. Office hours! Trying to put away some time to have individual meetings with all of your students so you can build a bond with them and therefore make them more engaged. With online environments, it’s hard to feel a bond or connection to anyone in your classroom but if you try and make an effort to build that connection with your students they will be more likely to enjoy the class

4. Online forums. Discussion boards are always a great way to facilitate student engagement. As a teacher, you can see how engaged the students are with their peers and have a chance at engaging with them in conversations, and additionally, as a student, you can build connections to other people in your class, and also engage with your teacher at the same time.

5. The last tool I’m going to talk about is offering regular feedback to your students. This feedback can be from you to the students or from the students to you but helpful either way. Feedback is especially important because it can help students gain more confidence, and better themselves through their work while also allowing you as a teacher to engage exam and tell them things are doing good at, things they might need improvement with, etc. etc.

I would use every single one of these strategies if I were to be an online instructor. For example, if I were to use the strategy of individualized meetings with each of my students, I would try and set a time up for the beginning of the semester, the middle of the semester, and the end of the semester to ask students how they’re doing, if they need help with anything, and for me to give them feedback on how they’ve been doing other work and talk to him about anything they might need help with. Additionally, I would ask students if there’s anything they need from me on my behalf. When I had an individualized meeting with a professor of mine about a year ago, he asked me if there’s anything I disliked about his class, and I thought it was really awesome that he did that because it allowed for me to voice some of my opinions on his teaching style and in turn, he took it to heart, and he did try and apply the advice I had offered him. This is why I feel individualized meetings are very important because it really allows for growth on both the students side and also the teachers side. My advice would be for teachers who are going to use individual meetings that they can be open to whatever their students have to say to them. 

That’s it for todays post! Thanks for reading everyone:)