My name is Sid from Thinkific and today I'm going to talk to you about
student engagement in your online courses. I'm also going to share five
specific strategies you can use to ensure that your students remain engaged
throughout your whole course before I get into the meat of things,
let's start with why engagement is important.
The reason people are investing in your online course and spending their
hard-earned money is to get results and make a change in their lives so if
they're not engaged, they're not going to get the results they're looking for and
that leads to dissatisfied customers maybe even refund request, bad reviews.
However on the other side, if they do get the value that they seek from your
course, then the upside for you is huge right not only do they become raving
fans and customers for life,
they'll tell everyone they know about it that means repeat business, great reviews
and tons of referrals. So how do you know whether your engagement rates are high
or low, the first thing to do is check the completion rate on your course so in
Thinkific you can see how far along students progress, average on average in
aggregate you can see what the average completion rates are and if those are
low, then you know you have a problem with engagement and that you need to
spice things up
using some of the strategies and my body share with you.
First way to increase engagement in your online course, make the videos short and
sweet. At Thinkific we usually suggest about 2-7 minutes for lecture so if you
have a really long one
break it up into multiple smaller ones and this allows students to feel like
they're moving along faster than if you had like a giant one hour video and
secondly, in today's day and age, people just don't have the attention span to
sit through an entire one hour video so if you have liked two-to-seven minute
length video then they can watch that maybe go take a short break, come back
and watch the rest.
Number two, is to add a progress bar in your course. Thinkific already has this
automatically enabled inside your courses so if you create a course on
Thinkific, every time a student finishes a lecture they see a little green
checkmark which sort of just gives them a little motivation and lets them know they've
completed one bit and they can they should be moving on to the next bit.
It also gives them the overall completion percentage so it shows them
how much they have already completed and how much you have left to complete and
that makes it easier for them to just keep going on.
Step 3, our strategy 3 is to add a regular check point so you can set up quiz
in Thinkific at the end of every chapter and just make it really simple
assessment to ensure that the students are actually learning and paying
attention to what you've been talking about in your course so this could be as
simple as asking them "Did you do the homework?"
Yes or No. And it just kind of brings their attention back changes things up a
bit and make sure that they are actually paying attention to your course and
again we knew when they get an answer right especially with an easy quiz, it
gives them a little more motivation to keep going.
Strategy number four, is to create regular emails and notifications for
your students. Students are going to finish your entire course in one sitting
and I often notice, I do this myself but when i sign up for a new course I'm very
motivated and enthusiastic about the course and I do a whole bunch of you
know the first few chapters and then I run out of time for the day and I log
out and then I don't come back after that so to bring students back after the
first session you want to send them an email maybe a reminder, letting them know
that you have completed x percent of the course and they only have so much more
to go
and of course Thinkific has this feature set up inside the dashboard you
can go to your notifications you can create these automatic email messages to
go out on a weekly basis and you can customize them.
And finally number five, is to build a community for your students and I've
noticed many instructors creating their own private facebook groups in Thinkific
you can create a disc you have a discussion feature so you can spark a
discussion among students and keep them engaged by chatting with them or
getting them to check with each other and help each other out.
Alright, so those are the five ways to make sure your students are engage
throughout your course. Go back and check your completion rates and if they're low you
need to do these five things: 1. make sure your videos are short and sweet.
2. Add a progress bar in your course. 3. Add quiz checkpoints along the way.
4. Set up automatic regular emails and notifications to your students.
5. Build a community or spark a conversation among students.