One of the drawbacks of online courses, when compared to learning in person, is that they are not interactive enough. It is difficult for students to maintain focused attention in such passive learning. Not to mention the distractions students have online with their social media. So how do you design your course in a way that increases the productivity of the students?
How do you keep their attention and make learning more effective? Incorporating active learning in your online class can help in this regard and help you resolve the question of how to create interactive online courses.
What is Active Learning
Active learning involves some activities where the students actively participate in the assignments and tasks given. These include quizzes, exams, and practical assignments. This is as opposed to passive learning, where students just sit and listen to the lecture. This can get boring for the student and the information is poorly absorbed during such passive learning sessions.
Active learning, on the other hand, makes online learning very efficient and effective. This is because all the senses are involved in interactive activities. Online courses, especially on subjects where practical implementation is more important than theory, need to be interactive to be helpful for the students. Also, it is easier to sell interactive courses. There are different ways to make courses interactive. Let’s learn how to create interactive online courses.
Some Ways To Create Interactive Online Courses
Exams and Quizzes
After every module of the course, you can include a small quiz or an exam. This shows the students how much of what they have watched is absorbed by them. If you think it’s necessary, keep a prerequisite of a certain score to move forward to the next module. The benefit of interactive courses is that it ensures that the student isn’t just skimming the lessons without properly understanding or grasping anything.
Quizzes give them a break from the passive watching of the course. When solving the problems in the quizzes, their brains are stimulated. This keeps them fresh and active during the course. Exams are also a good way of tracking a student’s progress in the course. Online courses in India related to competitive exams have separate sections of exams and quizzes in them.
Make short lessons
If the duration of the video lesson is around 1 or 2 hours long, it can be difficult for the student to keep attention throughout the video and effectively absorb all that is taught. That is why it is a good idea to divide the topic of the big video into small sub-topics and make short video lessons on them. Students will be able to focus much better in such small lessons. This is one of the best solutions for how to create interactive online courses.
This will also help remove all the unnecessary fluff from the videos. The videos will be more value intensive. This will save time both for you and your students. If you are making a free online course as a demo, it is a good idea to keep those interactive course videos short and crisp.
Practical assignments
If you are teaching something that is more skill-based, you need to include assignments in the course for the students to practice. Courses on design, digital marketing, content writing, or e-commerce include such assignments so that the students get their hands dirty in the implementation of the theory. Here, the students learn more effectively when they are simultaneously practicing what they are taught, and this keeps the courses interactive.
Insist the students in completing the assignments before moving on to the next module. Because if a student just watches the whole course without actually implementing anything, he is going to forget everything he has watched.
Gamify the course
What does this mean? It means making your course more like a game with rewards and achievement badges for each module or assignment they complete. This serves as instant gratification for students. You could create competition among students with the quizzes. Students can see their rank in various quizzes and exams.
This competitive spirit encourages students to study better. Thus one of the simplest and most fun ways to resolve the confusion of how to create interactive online courses.
Conduct live classes
Recorded videos are good for students to learn the subject at their own pace. But it can get quite boring and lonely, and students can lose the motivation to complete the course. This is where live classes help. Here they get to interact with teachers and other fellow students. They can ask any queries they have. This helps to keep the interaction going, and students focus during the classes.
Final Word
Use the above strategies and make your interactive courses. You can host these interactive online courses on your teaching app as well. Want to know how?
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5 Ways To Create Interactive Online Courses FAQs
A1. In order to make an interactive online course, use presentation slides and interactive elements, including videos, use storytelling methods, etc.
A2. if you want to make your training interactive, you can use rich graphics and keep the videos short, use game-based learning techniques. Also, you can include tests and assessments.
A3. Interactive learning means when students actively participate in the learning process and try to absorb as much information as possible.
A4. Five different types of interactive media available are websites, interactive television, gaming, blogs, and advertisements.
A5. Characteristics of an interactive course design are that it changes situations by shaping artifacts, has a lot of chances to explore, parallel possible solutions, and many more
