Motivation and engagement are important elements of an online course. This newsletter has featured many tips on how to improve student motivation and engagement. Here are a few more from a recent Magna Online Seminar led by Barbi Honeycutt, founder of Flip It Consulting.
- Offer choices—“Building in elements of choice can enhance engagement since students are working on tasks/topics that relate to their area of interest. For example, you could offer five topics from which students could choose to write their research paper on. Or you could offer a variety of formats for students to complete assignments,” Honeycutt said.
- Chunk course content—“It helps to apply chunking to the whole course to sustain engagement. Breaking larger units into smaller modules and/or revealing only one topic at a time so students can focus without getting overwhelmed are a couple of ideas to sustain engagement,” Honeycutt said.
- Show up—“Setting [up] online chat sessions, sharing examples, calling on students by name in the discussion board, making connections between student discussions … these are all ways to enhance engagement and sustain interest in a course,” she said.
For information about this online seminar, see www.magnapubs.com/catalog/the-flipped-approach-to-online-teaching-and-learning/.
