Students can lose concentration quite quickly when they are learning online. One way to help is to break the lesson up with questions, activities, discussions, polls, and short breakout-room tasks rather than talking for long periods.
So let’s look at 7 tips to make online teaching easier for you and more enjoyable for your students.
7 Tips for Engaging Online Students and Motivating Them
Motivating online students so that they get the most out of their learning is something you will need to pay attention to online as I’ll explain below:
1. Understanding Concentration Time When Teaching Online
One of the things you will realize very quickly when teaching online is that the students’ concentration levels are lower so motivating online students can be a little bit of a challenge!
Staying focused is much harder for students compared to offline teaching.
I find that you will need to engage directly with the students every two to three minutes.
So, if you are presenting and just talking, think about the concentration levels of your students. After a few minutes, you should ask them a question or do something that keeps them actively engaged.
Offline, when you are in the same physical space as the students, it is harder for the students to avoid your gaze, and they tend to focus more easily.
15-minute segments can work really well in online teaching. So, for example:
- 15 minutes of you teaching
- then 15 minutes for an activity to take place
- then perhaps a 15-minute class discussion
- and a 15-minute break
This is just an example, but the point is that you can be creative in breaking up and structuring the sessions.
2. Practice with Friends and Get Used to Online Teaching
I have lost count of the number of times that I hear of other teachers thinking that they know how to use their computer equipment and then starting to teach online and struggling to use the hardware and software.
The online class starts, and the teacher is still fumbling around with the equipment 10 minutes later as students wait. Don’t be that teacher online!
Whether you choose a platform such as Zoom, Skype, or MS Teams, ask a couple of friends or fellow teachers if you can practice first with them.
Try to get used to and familiar with how to set up breakout rooms, for example. These, by the way, are rooms where you can separate students into their own small groups for when you need them to do activities during the class online.
There is nothing worse than being an online student and realizing that the teacher has not properly prepared!
So if your goal is to improve your teaching for engaging online students, sort out the technology first!
3. Using Activities for Engaging Online Students
I have briefly mentioned breakout rooms above, and these can really help with running online activities to make the teaching you do more interesting to your online students.
The common thought from many teachers, when they teach online, is that running team-building activities or icebreakers online as virtual activities might be impossible.
Breakout rooms, though, make this possible and really quite easy once you get used to it.
For motivating online students, make good use of activities such as icebreakers and team-building games when teaching online, much like you would in a normal classroom.
These activities and training games are perhaps even more important when teaching online because of the difficulty in engaging online students and learners and in keeping their attention online.
4. Use Video and Interaction to Help Students Feel Connected
Video is useful for helping an online class feel less distant, but it is only one way to encourage participation. Give students other ways to take part too, such as answering in the chat, using reactions, responding to polls, or working in breakout rooms.
I have been a student myself in an online class where we could only see the teacher, i.e., we could not see the other students. The result of this was that after a while, simply watching one person on the screen became quite tedious.
5. Share Materials and Handouts Before the Online Lessons
Spending time sharing and sending documents during an online lesson will distract students online.
You can easily maintain a more effective online class by ensuring that you share all the class handouts and materials the students will need before the lesson.
Use email or a shared space online to share the document beforehand, and do this a day before, if you can.
Allow time for students to check their emails and prepare themselves for the online lesson.
Here’s a decent article on ways to share documents with online students.
6. Do Not Overtalk and Forget to Give Online Students Time to Think
A common mistake with new teachers when it comes to student engagement in online courses is the feeling that there should not be any silence in the lesson.
This issue occurs much more in online teaching and makes it harder to keep online students engaged.
Online, with so many faces visible, it is incredibly easy as an online teacher to feel the need to fill those pauses and to overtalk.
We cannot fill a pause by walking to the other side of the classroom, for example, in online teaching.
Just like offline, though, online students need time to think and to take in what is being taught.
Let me give you an example. If you ask a question as an online teacher, do not worry if there is a pause while your students ponder and consider their answers.
Learn to be comfortable with moments of silence as an online teacher, just as you would offline.
7. Use Feedback to Improve How You Teach Online
Online teaching is now well established, but virtual classes can require different teaching techniques from face-to-face sessions.
For this reason, do not be afraid to ask for and apply feedback from your students to improve. We are all learning how best to teach online!
As with classroom teaching, becoming a better teacher is a lifetime process, and you can evolve as a teacher as you teach online.
The feedback can be instrumental in online learning, and sometimes only small changes in the way you teach online can have a big impact.
It is your students who might suggest what needs changing, and in terms of engaging online students, it is the students who can often guide you toward achieving this.
When I first taught online, for example, it was a student who first suggested ‘Poll Everywhere‘ to me, when I started manually doing polls in online classes. I also learned about GoConqr for mind maps for online teaching, in the same manner.
Your students may be more familiar with certain software or hardware, so why not learn from their experience?
As teachers, we are not always technical wizards, and this is certainly one area where we can evolve with the help of our own students.
Final Thoughts
Teaching online can be great fun, and it is also worth considering that online teaching gives more students the opportunity to learn.
For some disabled students, online learning can remove barriers associated with traveling to and attending a physical classroom.
You should embrace online teaching as something that offers some great opportunities for you as a teacher. Engaging online students is more than possible with the techniques discussed.
For more guidance, see our Online Teaching Guides for trainers and educators.
Online Teaching Materials
If you run virtual workshops or online training, see how our editable training course materials can be used for online teaching, including activities, PowerPoint slides, trainer notes, and breakout-room exercises.
Training for Teaching Online
If you would also like to develop your own training and facilitation skills, Dr Valeria Lo Iacono teaches a Train the Trainer course on Udemy that you can study at your own pace.
