Looking to increase LearnDash student engagement? Online learning is very different from teaching in person, and engaging students who are not physically present can be challenging.
Virtual learning is an interesting field of educational and professional development, but it has its difficulties. Online students are prone to be distracted, and if your class starts to lose interest or concentration, you might expect a prolonged, difficult teaching session.
It is a waste of time for the instructor and the students if there is no engagement from the students. Not only that but it is exhausting and frustrating for everyone.
If you are a LearnDash user, you might be wondering what can be done to increase student engagement in online courses then, given that you never get to interact with your class in person? Let’s examine what student engagement is in more detail and discover ten practical strategies for increasing students’ interest in LearnDash courses.
What is Online Student Engagement?
The success of every educational institution depends in large part on student engagement. The degree of focus, interest, enthusiasm, and passion a student exhibits while learning is referred to as student engagement. The likelihood of success for a student increases with their level of engagement.
There are several possible formats to promote student engagement. For instance, students can actively listen, ask and answer questions, take notes, participate in group or individual activities, and get in touch with the instructor to request more materials or additional assignments.
While doing so, students should be motivated by a genuine interest in your course content, not by a desire to get good scores or obtain a certificate.
Instructors now place more emphasis on the student who is receiving the knowledge than on the knowledge itself.
Presently, their primary goals are to help people enjoy the learning process, pique students’ interest in their subject matter, and inspire and motivate them. You can accomplish that through several strategies for increasing LearnDash student engagement, which we’ll cover below.
Engaged students will learn your course material more efficiently, which will increase their satisfaction with your course and their propensity to give you excellent course ratings.
Different Types of Student Engagement in Online Learning
There are three different kinds of student engagement LearnDash course creators should be aware of:
Cognitive
Students who are cognitively engaged ask questions and look for additional resources to delve deeper into certain topics. The behavior of the students or a direct question about the most recent subject they were interested in and trying to learn more about can both be used to gauge cognitive engagement.
Emotional
Having an enjoyable educational experience and a good rapport with the teacher and other students are indicators of emotional engagement. Conducting an anonymous survey is a good way to analyze this type of engagement. Allowing a third party to gather and evaluate the results increases your chances of receiving genuine responses.
Behavioral
Students who participate in class by being punctual, having the necessary resources on hand, finishing their assigned work, and responding to questions are exhibiting behavioral engagement. Simply keeping an eye on the behavior of the students will enable you to spot those.
All three forms of engagement must be taken into consideration to understand how to adapt to the individuality of each student.
Why Does Student Engagement Matter for Your LearnDash Course?
Engaged students perform better, contribute to a focused learning environment, and are more likely to remember important knowledge whether they are physically or online.
However, there are numerous distractions that just wouldn’t exist in a physical classroom. But at home or at work, where many of your learners will join you, it is a different thing entirely. Because there is a strong temptation for people to divert their attention when they are using their devices.
As a result, the quality of your virtual classes depends greatly on how much you can engage your students. Because of this, online learning instructors must deploy strategies that can help increase the engagement of students in virtual classrooms.
Practical Strategies to Improve LearnDash Student Engagement
Engaging your students in the online component is considerably harder. They frequently engage in parallel activities and are very inclined to find other distractions.
To keep students engaged in the course, there must be something for them to do online. You must engage with them during and after these activities, and they must have the chance to connect with one another.
There are several approaches to increasing LearnDash student engagement. You can employ all of these strategies or a combination of them.
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Engage Students With Study Goals
The learning strategies used in traditional schools were always teacher-centered. The students would be free to set their own pace for learning and break free from the chain of uniformity, but this approach lacks flexibility.
Many students always view student-oriented classes as a more adaptable and preferred option. A highly pleasant strategy for getting students more involved in their education is the use of combined learning methods.
A great method to boost engagement is by getting students to get involved in their own learning by allowing them to set personal study goals. The student’s study goals can be divided into more manageable targets with the aid of LearnDash goals add-on.
Using the add-on, students can set weekly goals for how much time they want to spend studying and visually track their progress as they move through the course. This alone encourages the student to finish their assignments. Plus, the add-on also enables students to get email reminders encouraging them to keep working towards their objectives and congratulating them when they achieve them.
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Add Fun & Interactive Quizzes
There will be no engagement if you talk nonstop throughout the lecture. Students get the same result by watching any random video on the internet.
At the end of each block of knowledge, or at the very least at the conclusion of a class, a quiz or evaluation is an easy tool to use to get your students actively participating and reinforcing knowledge. It will also make it easier for you to see where your class needs more explanations and where you should dedicate more effort as an instructor.
To make your quizzes more engaging, we recommend LearnDash Advanced Quizzes. You are able to use brand-new, original question formats to make your quizzes more varied and interesting, set time constraints for answer submissions, and subtract points for questions that aren’t answered correctly. Additionally, using this add-on gives your students the option to save their quiz progress and come back to it later, which is highly beneficial when learning on the go.
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Use a Variety of Content Formats
If all that is taught are text-based lectures, students will quickly grow bored. In order to maintain students’ interest and engagement, we advise using audio, videos, or photos.
Your courses will be more interesting if students can interact with teachers and course material through learning activities. Your students can communicate directly with lecturers and other students in the course using audio recordings.
In some learning contexts, like language and musical training, audio is extremely important. Audio contributions will be useful for language, music, and other relevant instructors, allowing them to properly assess students’ performance.
A good plugin to help you achieve this is the Learndash Audio Assignments add-on. With this add-on, your students can record and submit audio files as part of their assignment submissions. Students can record their comments immediately on the website and download their audio contributions.
Furthermore, we advise using videos, images, and recordings within your lessons. Additionally, you can incorporate private 1 on 1 sessions with your students, to offer a more personal learning experience within your course using Snap Orbital’s Private Sessions for LearnDash plugin.
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Minimize on-screen distractions
Making sure the course material is interesting is one method to improve student engagement in your online course. But reducing distractions is also effective and important.
For this reason, we recommend taking advantage of LearnDash’s core Focus Mode feature, to keep your course pages as minimal as possible. On-screen elements can further be customized using the Learndash Focus Mode Pro add-on. As a result, you’ll keep your students’ attention for longer than ever.
We also recommend using a simple design on your website, opting for easy-to-read fonts, and keeping your content short and snappy.
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Promote Group Work and Collaboration
When students collaborate on assignments, they are exposed to new perspectives and viewpoints. This greatly enhances motivation and productivity.
Create short, straightforward collaborative assignments, especially at the beginning of a course, and gradually increase their complexity as time goes on. This should provide students with practice working effectively in an online team and an opportunity to observe which team members get along best.
This process is made easy with the aid of the Learndash Buddy Up add-on. By immediately inviting any other user registered for the course to “buddy-up,” students can form groups with their fellow students. Once in a group, students can submit assignments together, share notes and chat, making the online learning environment a lot more “classroom-like”.
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Raise the stakes on projects and assignments
You can engage all students in your course by offering a choice of assignment and activity types. However, a lot of online courses allow students to work at their own pace and submit work at any time. While this is great for flexibility, it certainly reduces the pressure to complete work on time and stick to the schedule.
You can guarantee that every student is interactive and on task by adding more structure and rigidity to your course schedule. This is especially important with younger students, who might not be as self-motivated to learn as adults. Using the Learndash Assignments Deadline add-on, you can set submission deadlines for lessons and assignments. You can also choose to accept late submission for a given period of time with a certain score penalization, motivating your students to complete their assignments on time.
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Identifying And Addressing The Needs of Students
Teachers are aware of the individuality of each student in their classes. Each participant adds experiences to the classroom that shape who they are as learners. To reach every student, teachers must use a variety of techniques.
To ensure that your students receive the most from your course, you can adapt their education to their skill level using LearnDash Adaptive Learning Pro.
This add-on allows you to personalize the learning journey, by enrolling your students into different courses or course versions according to their results on an initial evaluation. This way you can make sure your students receive the education they truly need and can benefit from.
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Gamification Can Increase Positive Competition
It is crucial to recognize each student’s accomplishments and to inspire struggling students to keep trying. Here’s where gamification comes in, as it introduces game-like elements such as prizes and awards to recognize student progress. At the same time, game-like consequences like point deductions are included in your course structure.
For every class, session, and test offered, the BadgeOS LearnDash add-on enables your students to earn virtual points and badges. They can also be awarded special ranks according to their performance, helping you build a hierarchy of students. Using leaderboards students can keep track of their scores and awards and even compete with each other.
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Build Online Forums And Chat Rooms
It is crucial to convey the idea that education takes place outside of the virtual classroom. To promote debate and curiosity and provide a secure area for queries, you can build forums, groups, and discussions. Find ways to encourage student interaction and idea sharing.
BuddyPress is the perfect plugin to use if you want to create a community around your courses. It facilitates the inclusion of social learning components in your course. Consequently, they become more interesting and memorable.
This plugin is thoughtfully created to encourage group learning. It enables people to hold discussions about particular topics or courses. Consequently, it enhances the value of your online courses.
Alternatively, you could switch to the BuddyBoss theme, and add a full set of community features to your online course. Since BuddyBoss is built to work with LearnDash, integration is seamless and easy.
Finally, for more simple and straightforward communication, you can take advantage of the LearnDash Group Chat add-on and implement a course chat box to your eLearning site, allowing students to interact in real-time.
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Listen to your students’ feedback
In every educational environment, it’s important to regularly provide feedback and teach your students how to both give and receive it. Not only is feedback important for your students, but it also plays an essential part in your ongoing efforts to make your course better. The ability to review your course gives the learner a sense of importance and keeps your students engaged even after completing the course content.
Using a star rating system and adding written comments to their reviews, students can rate your course with the Learndash Feedback add-on.
LearnDash Student Engagement
One thing is to create an online course; another is to maintain interest in it. Motivated, inquisitive, and interested students result in a stress-free teaching experience. Therefore, as an online teacher, employing engaging teaching methods should be one of your top objectives.
You can get assistance from our LearnDash Consultants in choosing the best LearnDash add-ons to improve your website and online courses. You can count on us to help you make your eLearning website better.
