Featured Image Caption: Engagement in Online Classes
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Are you worried about your class engagement in online sessions? Well, it is a common problem seen in online education. You cannot pinpoint one student and tell them to come back from their imagination and focus on their education. In online lectures, when you do not see your students sitting in neat rows or sitting attentively. The picture is completely different from physical classes because everybody is in their mood and zone. You would see both the dull and attentive faces. Somebody might be just up, and you may not identify it because of the blurry picture on the screen.
Online education is difficult to monitor because you have to make sure that students are participating in the session while delivering the lecture. There are a lot of other things that come in your way, like slow internet connection and drop of a signal. All these problems divert your attention, and somehow students get the relaxation to zone out.
They start doing little stuff around them like drawing on-page or starring at their room curtains. In these situations, you are unable to identify who is mentally present in the class. But that does not mean it completely gets out of your hand.
There are some tricks and ideas for increasing class engagement during online classes. Using them will increase the interest and participation of students in lectures. And they include:
1. Create a Connection with Students
It is often thought that in online classes, you can communicate with students because of social distancing. But this is not true, because you can still connect with your students while sitting behind the screen. When you are socially distancing, it does not mean you are at distance in actuality. You can still communicate with your students and can listen to their concerns and issues. You can use social media for this purpose. Ask your students to share their problems and question related to topics at your email and other social media platforms. It helps you in connecting with your students, and they would not feel lost during the lecture.
When you do not respond to student problems and tell them that discussion is not possible in an online class, they get disconnected from your lectures. In this way, they lose interest, and you can ask them to engage students in your lectures. But when you give the privilege to your students to speak up, they automatically interact with you during the class. Communication is the key element of increasing engagement during online education, and it has proven to be the best.
2. Provide Active Learning Opportunities
Most people have this misconception that in online education, you only have to sit behind the screen. And there is no concept of physical activity in it. But this idea of just listening and doing nothing is not inaccurate. When you address the same thing, you allow your students to disengage during the lecture. What you need to do during online classes is to keep your students active. It does not mean you have to ask them to do exercise but to stimulate their thinking. You can arrange certain brainstorming activities in online classes to increases their interaction in lectures. You can also assign them some interesting activities related to their lectures, like asking them to interview people around them. It would help them in using both their mind and body. When both the brain and body are working together chances of zoning out during lectures decreases.
3. Provide Timely Feedback
One of the most common problems that students face during online education is the lack of feedback from teachers. In online education, most of the teachers think that they only have to focus on lecture delivery. They skip giving feedback to students because of social distancing. But this is not how you handle students during online education. Giving feedback to students and answering their questions is extremely important when it comes to online education. They look up to you especially, the shy students who cannot ask anything in front of everybody. They mostly share their problems personally with you. In this case, it is essential to give them a proper response and their feedback on the lecture. When you ask for feedback on the previous lecture students, take part in it. It increases their participation and class engagement. The online qari also uses this trick to keep their students interactive during their learning sessions.
4. Improve Course Accessibility
In online education, student interaction decreases when you provide a divided course to your students. When they are not able to get the proper content accessibility, they cannot study and interact. If you want your students to engage in online classes, improve the course accessibility for students. You can do it by providing them web sources and by asking them to use social media for this purpose.
By Arslan Haider
who is author of the above blog. He is a Senior SEO Expert at MediaHicon (deals in SEO services). Apart from that, he loves to post blogs with valuable content.
Member since January, 2021
View all the articles of Arslan Haider.
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