9 Steps to make your online classes more engaging/interesting/fun for your students

The SARS-COV2 pandemic has forced colleges and universities around the world to shut down and offer their courses / classes online. Since 2002, I have designed online test prep programs for SAT, GMAT, IAS and IIM-CAT and trained teachers of a school chain online, apart from taking a few courses online myself and I can say one thing for sure that the attention span of everyone in an online training is much less than that in a normal classroom setting. In a classroom setting the students are a captive audience for three reasons :

1. Teachers just cannot tolerate students not concentrating on what he is teaching, students talking and having fun and most importantly students walking out of their class in progress. So, whether the teacher is interesting or boring, whether students want to study or not, the fear of disciplinary action is built in our schooling system and the students just cannot think of stepping out of the classroom.
2. Since age 4, we have been into the practice of attending classes, day after day, 5 days a week. Its hard wired in our brains that while the teacher is teaching in class, you have to at least pretend that you are concentrating and stepping out of the classroom is out of question.
3. The presence of a physical teacher in the classroom – writing on the board, teaching or moving around in class with his eyes scanning the students – meant that switching ourselves off from the class activity was out of question.

It’s a different matter that the school bell ringing after every half an hour ensured that our attention span became less than 30 minutes. It was only exams that expected us to use our brains continuously for 3 hours. Some of us were more diligent so we practiced for that 3-hour anomaly by taking mock test/simulated exams/preboards etc. But still, exams were an annual or bi-annual affair so our attention spans didn’t really improve because of them.

And to top it all if your students belong to Generation Z (mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years) or Generation Alpha (early 2010s as starting birth years and the mid-2020s as ending birth years), then you are staring at even shorter attention spans and restless souls to engage. The brains of these kids are hardwired for multiple higher frequency of stimuli of various types. And social media and online games have got them hooked to higher and more frequent bursts of dopamine and other endorphins decreasing their levels of patience for anything that doesn’t stimulate them more strongly.

The class dynamics are different for online schooling/training. So lets see what can be done

1.     Don't stream your classes, instead record your lectures and edit them

• Live classes don’t work as they have a lot of dull and dead moments that can make your students hit the exit button. Record your whole class and view it. You will realise that even you cannot watch your complete session. So either take a video editing course or take help from a professional video editor to prepare a storyboard – Storyboard is a written document that details what would be on screen of the student – you sitting and teaching, writing on a board, a question appearing or you waiting for an answer.

2.     Show your face

• As a teacher, you may be too worried about the text not being clear on a slow internet connection, but before the text can be looked at, the students need to connect/relate with you as a human being at a more interpersonal level. So, you have to appear on the screen complete, and not in a square corner at the bottom of screen, rather full screen. Appear on the whole screen to introduce the topic, give a little segue to the last topic taught. Talk about the importance and weightage of topic and how it would help students understand other related stuff. Smile, no not the plasticky airhostess smile, but give the genuine warm smile you would love to kids whose life you are touching.

3.     Keep videos short

• Again, that shorter attention span stuff – Teach for a short time with a video, then ask them a question or give a short quiz, before your next short teaching video starts.

4.     Test out slides

• The text on the board is not to be scribbled by you. In classes, students tolerated that. In an online class, they wont. So type down your text in a power-point slide. Use a nice background and remember if the younger your students are the more colourful and tackier your slides should look. Don’t use a standard template. Keep changing the template after every 4 slides.

5.     Use existing resources

• Use an online meeting platform. There's Google Meet and Zoom—maybe you could even use Slack and MS Teams. It’s not like meeting in person, but you can at least keep the two-way communication going and avoid the out-of-sight, out-of-mind syndrome

6.     Give specific instructions

• Give clear instructions about how to mute or unmute a conversation, how to raise hands and ask a question in online class, how and from where to download assignments and how to submit them.

7.     Provide interactive activities

• Assign an out-of-class project but not an out of home one. Maybe students can use this time to make some measurements at home, draw complicated figures, sketch and do a simple lab exercise in kitchen (comes without saying – under parental supervision). This reminds me that that you have to leave clear instructions for parents and guardians also about usage of online classes and to monitor their ward’s progress

8.     Extend the Learning Window

• Asynchronous courses put the onus on students to budget their time and meet learning expectations. Students have a great deal of flexibility in these courses. Synchronous classes, on the other hand, are often teacher-led and tied to specific windows of time. That doesn’t mean that learning can’t still be flexible. You don’t have to squeeze all of your learning into those small windows of time. In fact, spreading out learning activities can be a much more effective way to teach. You might consider sending students on WebQuests before the next scheduled class. Or, you could try flipping the class. Have students watch instructional videos and read relevant articles before class at a time of their choosing. Then, use the small window of time that you have together for discussion, guided practice, or application. Try to challenge your students to connect what they are learning with the real world, so that each moment can be a learning experience. Don’t, however, just dump extra homework on them. Any added tasks shouldn’t be a chore; they should motivate students to become life-long learners and connect what they learn with their life.

9.     What about giving what students want

• Feedback – Honestly ask your students (users) what can you do more to make the classes more interesting. You will be surprised with creative suggestions that you can use.