Hello everyone and welcome to yet another online teaching case study! In this weeks case study, we are going to be discussing student engagement and how it affects your online courses. This case study was actually inspired by student feedback on how to engage more students and to have them participate more in our online courses.
I will be discussing three main areas to help you engage more of your students and show you specific examples from my own online courses! The three main areas we will be discussing in this post are:
1) How To Get Your Students To Participate in Your Online Course Discussion Board and How To Generate Engaging Discussions Online!
2) How To Have Your Students Consume More of Your Videos (average viewing time)
3) How To Keep Students Coming Back For More and Re-Engaging Your Students Once They Have Finished Your Course.
There are many different ways to answer these questions above. However, I will for times sakes stick the ones that have produced the best results for myself and many other online instructors.
Let's Go ahead and start with our first topic:
1) How To Get Your Students To Participate in Your Online Course Discussion Board and How To Generate Engaging Discussions Online!
In my own personal experience teaching online one of the best ways to have your students post on your discussion board is to have them introduce themselves to their classmates and write a short message telling everyone about themselves! We all love talk about ourselves and share who we are don't we? I know one of the main reasons I became a teacher is because I love sharing my life and personal experiences with others. I also really enjoy helping them get amazing results in their life! Teaching and sharing who we are with others is priceless! So I have implemented this strategy in many of my online courses and there have been many students who have participated!
Here is a excellent example from my Free Course on how to start building your confidence and self-esteem!
Below you will find pictures how I ask students to talk about themselves and introduce themselves to myself and their classmates! I Give (and talk) about who I am (showing an example) and then ask the students to do the same. Check out the screen shots below!
(Lecture #2 Titled: Please Introduce Yourself To Your Classmates and I!)
Here is the text lecture for you to see exactly how I ask for students to participate!
So, what are the results? I have students almost everyday post on my course discussion board!
This screenshots (I cut out names and made the students anonymous for privacy reasons) will show you my student engagement! It is also very fun to see and hear from my students all across the world!
Now there are many more discussion posts just like this, but for times sakes and to make this reading friendly I have just added one screenshot! I encourage you to try something like this out in one of your online courses today!
2) How To Have Your Students Consume More of Your Videos (average viewing time)
Lets now discuss how we can engage our students and have them view and consume more content in our videos! Video engagement (minutes watched ect.) is tracked online and can be found on Udemy and many other online platforms.
The key is to have above average minutes viewed in your online courses! Here is an example from my bestselling Evernote Course on Udemy
As you can see, I have above average ratings and above average minutes consumed per active student. These two things combined help lead to a top paid bestselling online video course!
Here is another example from my bestselling Transform Your Confidence and Self-Esteem course!
So i'm sure you asking yourself "now Joe, how do we actually get our students to watch our courses and consume the minutes!"
Great question and here is the best answer I can provide for you based on my own experience:
Create A Really High Quality Course!
There are many different factors that go into this, but I will recommend using high end equipment to record your courses (you don't have to break the bank either, I started with $50.00 microphone and a slow Mac Mini Computer!) and also having great content in your course... AKA some really useful information! This will help engage your students and keep them watching your courses longer! The two courses (Evernote and Self-Esteem) are my highest quality courses and their engagement results mirror their quality!
3) How To Keep Students Coming Back For More and Re-Engaging Your Students Once They Have Finished Your Course.
What happens to your students once they finish your online course? Do they ever come back? How should we go about re-engaging those students? Great question. The single best way to re-engage the students who have finished your course is to add in FRESH NEW CONTENT to your course! You can do this by adding in additional videos/ esources/posts/articles/ ect. This is effective for a few reasons:
1) They get to learn more and have to come back to your course in order to do so. Students love learning more on a subject, especially when you keep things up to date!
2) They might want to / have to re-watch previous lectures to understand the new content which will re-engage them back in the course.
3) They will re-watch the course again as a refresher and re-engage themselves since they enjoyed the course the first time through!
A great way to let your students know about new content once you have uploaded it is to send out an educational announcement or email to your students! Here is an example from my JavaScript Course! Many students were very thankful :)
Thank you for reading our blog post today! If you have any questions please feel free to post your comments below!
Also, you can check out all of my blog posts for FREE by going to:
Sincerely,
Joe Parys
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