It’s easy to feel disconnected from your students when you work online. These six tips will help you engage students in your online course.
1) Engage students with short, frequent assignments
Each week, students are required to complete a few brief assignments. This will allow them to engage in course topics and keep them practicing throughout the week.
2) Reward progress & practice
Instead of imposing sanctions, motivate your students by highlighting their achievements. Take a look at your course and consider these suggestions.
You can give partial credit for question attempts: In your assignment settings, you can allow students to attempt questions even if they fail. Your students will attempt all questions, even those that are more difficult.
Assign Personal Study Plan for Additional Credit: The Personal Study Plan is a great resource that encourages independent student learning. The PSP can be used to assign a grade or extra credit to students who study.
Encourage students to complete assignments on time
There are many ways to encourage your students not to lose their focus and to submit assignments on time.
Encourage students to enable email reminds: WebAssign allows students the ability to customize their notification settings so they can email them about upcoming due dates and announcements.
Reward students who complete their assignments early: This will help to prevent students from procrastinating.
Communicate clearly your extension policy. WebAssign allows you to set up automatic extensions if the request meets your criteria.
For your approval, manual extensions will be sent to you. Clear communication of your policy will reduce the number and quality of student questions.
Reward students who do not use extensions: At the end the semester, you will be able to view all extensions granted to identify and award extra credit students who have completed 100% of their work on-time.
4) Use Class Insights to identify areas for student support
Regularly review Class Insights to ensure your class is proficient in the topics. You might give your class additional assignments, video lessons, or practice opportunities on topics WebAssign has identified as areas of concern. You can also direct students to the Personal Study Plan, if it is available, for individual support.
5) Don’t let students jump ahead
You can pace your course in the same way that you teach. WebAssign allows you to adjust the assignment and scheduling settings to keep students focused. We recommend:
Pay attention to the Assignment Available Date. Within your assignment scheduler you can set the date that each assignment is available for students. To ensure students don’t rush, you can pace your assignments by limiting how many assignments are available each week.
Use Conditional Release: This is a great tool if you want to ensure that students understand a topic thoroughly before they move forward. You can assign a score that students must achieve before you move forward with conditional release. You can also grant access to the next assignment after a certain date.
6) Schedule Progress Checks
To ensure that you are always in touch with students and to communicate their progress, incorporate specific assignments and student-teacher meeting.
Schedule frequent, short quizzes: Students can be continuously assessed on their knowledge by scheduling frequent quizzes. This allows them to identify topics that require work.
You should require at least one instructor-student meeting. You can hold virtual office hours, and students must attend at least one session. Coordinate a time using WebAssign’s private message. Ask students to review their Class insights before these meetings and to be prepared to discuss any problems. You can assess student performance and offer suggestions.
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