Increasing number of students are opting for online courses to complete their education since it provides them with a lot more benefits than traditional learning in the classroom.
Online courses provide students with greater flexibility, which is one of the most important reasons why they choose to take an online course in the first place. They can simply log into their classes from the comfort of their home or even while they are on-the-go as per their convenience and whenever they want. Being able to learn at their own pace is exactly what students find most enticing about online courses and learning.
Engage Your Students with a Visually Appealing Online Course
You need to make sure your students are completely engaged in your online course in order to deliver quality and provide them with real learning benefits. If you make your online course visually appealing, it will certainly attract your learners while every single class will be fun and interesting to them. This is exactly what will help them acquire knowledge more efficiently and they will pass every exam with flying colors.
Your online course should be interactive so that your students can really connect with the content you provide them with. You should add various features that will help your students learn better and faster. Adding educational videos and other multimedia features is one way to accomplish that. Also, adding colorful graphics will help your learners digest every piece of information more easily.
Multi-sensory additions help involve both sides of their brain, which helps the learners be more focused on the content and, thus, easily acquire the necessary knowledge and skills. That is precisely the main reason why your online course should be visually appealing.
Here are some of the key online course design features that you should implement in order to improve the performance of your students.
1. Forums and Online Communities
Forums and online communities are very important for both students and teachers as they provide a way for discussing their online courses and every possible subject that they need information about. Of course, social media have made it possible for everyone to exchange instant messages and students can communicate with their peers via these channels. However, forums and online communities that can be integrated into your online course will make it a lot easier for your students to discuss their assignments both with the instructors and with their peers.
2. Social Engagement
With the help of social engagement tools, you can send messages to your students and instantly get the feedback you need. These tools will enable you to send alerts and notifications to your students regarding any important announcement, and you can do so across social media networks and email. Also, these tools can help you track your learners’ engagement and progression.
3. Live Feedback
Live feedback is yet another very important feature for every effective online course. When students are isolated from their peers and they learn completely independently, they can feel disconnected and not motivated enough to complete their assignments. Live feedback helps your students to better understand the course and everything it entails, not to mention that it inspires and motivates them to learn more. Therefore, make sure you implement the feature that enables one-on-one interaction and helps your students build confidence as well.
4. Assessment Features
Various assessment tools that help you create quizzes and tests that will have the ability to improve the performance and accelerate learning of the students. They can engage in various quizzes in their leisure time, outside of the ongoing projects you assign to them. More importantly, you can create personalized quizzes and tests according to each student’s skills and, thus, help them improve their performance more effectively.
These tools can help you assess your learners, as you can gain an insight into their strengths and weaknesses and, thus, address them to help the students improve and ultimately complete the course successfully. Needless to say, quizzes make learning more fun and enjoyable, which positively impacts your students’ performance.
5. Interactive Features
As already mentioned, an interactive online course engages students more and significantly accelerates their learning. Therefore, you need to make sure you implement various interactive features into your online course in order to improve the performance of your students and help them upgrade their skills.
You can create videos, add pictures, audio content and provide hyperlinks to increase the interactivity that your learners need. Interactive features, like quizzes, improves the effectiveness of the learning content.
Conclusion
There are quite a few tools that can help you create online courses. In order to choose the best tool that will be the right fit for your and your students’ needs, you should look for the one that can provide you with the aforementioned features.
We suggest opting for a tool that will help you deliver high-quality content and create visually appealing courses that will be easy to navigate and engage the learners effectively. An LMS that will help you easily create content and communicate with your students, as well as assess them and identify their strengths and weaknesses, not to mention that it includes all of the key features for improving student performance is capable of making learning fun and interesting.
