Table of Contents
- How to Keep Your Learners Engaged through the Use of a Learning Management System
- Motivate and Grab the Attention of the Learner
- Increase Confidence in Order to Motivate Students
- How Can You Create a Social Learning Within My Learning Management Syste
- Include Students in the Creation of Course and Learning Management System Regularly
- Resources and References:
How to Keep Your Learners Engaged through the Use of a Learning Management System
Many schools have adopted learning management systems that they can use in creating, delivering lessons to learners, administering, managing online learning content, serving notifications, and sharing data with authorized users.
A learning management system usually operates inside a web browser, behind a secure sign-on process. This provides teachers and instructors an opportunity to access courses instantly, while administrators can monitor the progress of students and make improvements where necessary.
You might have invested in a learning management system, but it would not make much impact if your learner does not engage with learning. In this article, we explore ways a learning management system can make the drab and boring learning process more engaging and interactive.
Motivate and Grab the Attention of the Learner
They say variety is the spice of life, and online learning engagement is not different. At the root of engagement and motivation is interest, and there are many ways you can stimulate the curiosity of your learners.
1. Attract Students with Great Images
Similar to a striking front-page photograph that can motivate a reader to click on a website article or purchase a newspaper, fantastic imagery built in your online learning module will add more interest to the online course. Although building a learning institution identity is crucial, ensure that the material is not bland or poorly rendered. Strong images stimulate and provoke, a decent level of layout variety across your learning management system will attract and retain learners on board, and great graphic design would add value without distraction.
2. Online Learning Through Interaction
The many opportunities for interaction ought to draw online learners in. Study shows that learning elements providing an immersive experience tend to succeed in regard to user uptake. Live videos that take learners through a new concept is one way of engaging them. Proactive education that asks questions frequently that are posed in a fun and humorous manner may also lead to successful engagement. Humor is the best way of increasing engagement with learners, but be sure to maintain it appropriately.
3. Utilize Multimedia in Your Modules in order to Retain Students
You ought to consider that your students are likely to have different learning preferences. Including multimedia content is the best way of providing different groups of learners with an engaging learning system management. Where some students opt for text-based learning, others might prefer taking animated courses or downloading videos to listen to.
4. Increase Confidence in Order to Motivate Students
Building confidence is crucial to continuous learning management system engagement. When challenging levels are pitched correctly, learners are more encouraged to continue pursuing their education. Make things too easy, and you will run the risk of courses seeming pointless, but in case lessons are complex, the anxiety of failure can result, and learners can start feeling that they cannot achieve and progress.
How to Structure Your Online Learning Course
Learning goals ought to be reachable. Micro-learning can assist here, structuring lessons in bite-size chunks that build up to mastering a skill or understanding a new concept. Online learners with significant workloads can abandon their virtual learning if courses take too long to complete or include a lot of tasks before they can proceed. Likewise, students with low confidence will benefit from a sense of quick progress.
Setting Clear Virtual Learning Goals
Clarity is important in regard to the building of confidence – make sure that your online courses have a clearly defined destination. Whether that is getting your staff up with new legal requirements or safety and health practices, every learner should be able to see why they are learning a specific topic, and it can assist them in their day-to-day studies.
Social Learning
No man is an island, and when you are developing a course for your learning management system, consider including many opportunities for the online learner to interact with one another. Many learning institutions have team-building days in their programs every year, but your online learning software provides opportunities to get students learning and bonding more often.
Healthy Competition
Research shows that healthy competition in the form of leaderboards can stimulate continued interaction with virtual learning tools. This assists in building confidence and additionally respect between learners while giving every learner something to aim for. If you aim at presenting learning targets in a fun, game-like scenario, many students will be drawn to take part even if they might not ordinarily be competitive.
Teamwork with a Learning Management System
Some students learn best in groups. Social learning can bring groups together and allow otherwise reserved learners to exhibit their talents to move a group forward as a whole. There are many options to do this built into most learning management system software, so use it whenever possible. Gamification, live video, and rapid-fire multiple-option tests to compete on a team scoreboard can all spice things up and encourage students to engage with their learning.
Creating a Virtual Learning Community
Social media is a tool that you can use to keep the learner from feeling isolated. Info sharing, group chats, and setting up virtual forums can assist every participant in staying connected to their peers and their virtual studies. Your education learning management system can have social media plug-ins to link through, making feedback and assistance from classmates available at the touch of a button.
Include Students in the Creation of Course and Learning Management System Regularly
Your learning management system is there to deploy learning to your students. Listening to your online students is an important step in keeping them engaged with the course content.
1. Involve Students When Building Virtual Learning
Yes! Give and ask for feedback frequently when developing new courses. If you involve your students with learning management system decisions and make an effort to discover what they would like to build on, course uptake will be higher. Additionally, you will find that interest is sustained in the longer term.
2. Listen to Feedback and Ideas
You may be the boss, but it is crucial to remember when creating your learning management courses that knowledge does not always come from on high – you’ve likely got some really skilled people working for you! Each member of the team, irrespective of position, perhaps has something they can offer. You should stay open to suggestions for course content and allow team members’ input to boost learning engagement.
What features can make an LMS more engaging for students?
One of the common features of an LMS is to have a discussion forum. This feature allows teachers to start discussions about specific subjects, and students can interact with each other by posting their thoughts. As there are various ways for users in a discussion thread to reply back such as writing comments or sending messages, it also helps them interact with more people and to learn from each other.
However, it is a fact that students do not want to participate in discussions all the time. As they are busy studying for exams or finishing classwork, they usually spend little time on the discussion forum and prefer to browse through it only when there are free times available. In this case, teachers will not be able to notice that there is a big discussion going on on a specific day.
So, how can the teacher know more about this case? As discussed above, the statistics provided by an LMS do not show many details of discussions, which makes it hard for teachers to understand what discussions are taking place in the forum and when they occur.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get real-time information from your students through push notifications? This way, you will never lose track of important discussions nor miss critical answers from students whenever and wherever you are!
To solve this problem, Webnovel has come up with a solution called Timeline. Timeline is designed to provide a more comprehensive, detailed, and interactive way for teachers and students to understand the progress of a discussion.
Timeline helps all involved parties – teachers, students, and educational institution administrators – to track discussions in an LMS as they happen. It can significantly improve the engagement level of teachers with their students by summarizing timely information about discussions into easily digestible charts. This will give them more time to focus on other important activities during the course such as grading assignments or providing instant answers via messages.
Let’s take a look at how Timeline works:
Student A posts something on the forum 2 hours ago;
Teacher B saves Student A’s message and replies 1 hour ago;
Student C replies to Teacher B 10 minutes ago;
Teacher D received a message from Student C 2 minutes ago.
These kinds of interactions are not shown in the statistics provided by an LMS, but they can be found in Timeline. With this information at hand, Teachers A and C will not miss out on important discussions while Teacher D will know that there is something going on with his student which he needs to address immediately. Furthermore, if we consider school administrators’ positions, they now have another way to search for and analyze topics of discussions their students are having outside class time without any hassle of looking into individual profiles or learning the new features of the software themselves. This feature will save them lots of time in managing their virtual classrooms.
Timeline is a great tool for teachers and students to stay informed about discussions on the platform and can also reduce time-consuming efforts from both sides. It will be a huge plus when it comes to helping foster communication between teachers and their students, which is extremely important in enhancing the learning experience!