Pandemic and post-pandemic years have shown us how to sell online courses. But have educators mastered the art of creating engaging content yet? For most teachers and institutions, engagement happens only for live classes.
For effective delivery of lessons and learning procedures, you need to sell courses online through diverse forms of interaction. Especially for high school students, who avail online courses only for a few months, it is important to include as many engagement factors as possible. Teenagers and adult students have different ways to interact with content and absorb it. Communicating with them regularly is one way to do it.
Varied engagement methods are recommended for new coaches to establish their learning website online for the first time.
They need to ask themselves;
- How can the course be made more fun and engaging?
- What are the areas that need the maximum amount of engagement?
- What content can be turned into a video, activity, audio, or visual?
- How can students benefit from this engagement?
You need to ensure that there is a balance between theoretical classes and practical learning methodologies to provide an optimum learning experience.
Designing learning content
The course content will remain the same as the syllabus suggests. It is the process through which you teach the course that matters. Everything does not translate easily in these theories, you need to find delightful text on the topic to include students in the learning process and make them curious. here are some tips for designing and engaging learning content;
- Establish learning communities and chat rooms on the web page. Every subtopic and discussion board can have a different title.
- Regularly host live classes instead of only uploading pre-recorded videos of explanation topics.
- Apply gamification teaching methodologies and reward students whenever they can adapt to such methodologies conveniently.
- Use practical storytelling methods for teaching.
- Use the dual method of self-paced or asynchronous learning and synchronous or real-time learning.
Before you finally jump into creating different learning designs, plan it out. Organize, compile and present the methodology only after considering your students’ abilities and absorption capacity. The course might remain the same, but every year a different batch of students would attend the course. The scene in the third cannot be useful for every child because they’re learning patterns are unique.
You might also have some special needs children who cannot adapt to an engagement-oriented learning framework. Although while setting up courses early you might not have to modify the website for special needs students, it becomes a necessity when the audience or student base expands. Have a few methods for such circumstances planned.
Course length
Of course, our session length should be the least amount of time your students would take from not knowing anything about this subject to specializing in every topic under it. To calculate roughly how long the session could last distribute topics into lecture hours, and the number of revision classes and test hours. It should benefit you, and save you and the students time while imparting the maximum amount of learning in the shortest period. Most students focus on efficient learning and are ready to subscribe with the same amount as that of a longer course duration, provided they have similar outcomes at the end of the course.
Social elements
All of us are social animals come and engagement is possible only if everyone communicates and socializes. The biggest challenge you might face here is to implement self-paced online learning at the times these students don’t engage on your platform.
You might want to build an online community that links through your learning website into a different platform to encourage out-of-topic social elements such as personal interaction and peer-to-peer support. It weeds out students who might access chat rooms only for socializing purposes and allows self-paced learners to believe in your learning platform for giving them an easy hassle-free way of clearing doubts. The official place where students talk about learning topics only, and do not socialize can include instructor support or student support, considering whoever is available.
Lastly, don’t forget your profitability. To sell courses online is a good course, beneficial for students as they gain knowledge. You must ensure that the cost in monetary and effort terms of creating engaging methods does not exceed your economic and non-economic profit.
