Keeping learners motivated is becoming more challenging in the ever growing mobile learning environment, especially when compared to the traditional classroom setting. When you offer training remotely over the internet your learners may wonder off to surf the internet, check emails or even do other tasks in the background. You need to find ways to motivate your learners so that they don’t get tempted to multitask during the training session. The following are simple ways you can use to motivate your learners to follow through with your lessons:
- Show your learners what they stand to gain
The best way to motivate your learns is to start by showing them what they stand to gain from taking your course. Outline the course goals and break down the lessons so that learners know what’s in it for them and how the course will be helpful to their individual lives. This way learners will be invested in the material and motivated to remain attentive so as to gain more from it.
- Make the Content fresh and exciting
With online learning, it is relatively easy to make the content of your course fresh and exciting. Instead of using old examples from textbooks you can share current events that best illustrate given concepts. You can share new videos and use fresh digital content to explain the theoretical coursework and to relate the theories to the trainee’s work. You may also consider inviting a guest speaker to share their personal experiences with learners via live or recorded video. Things like timely and relevant content and access to experts make learners more excited to take your course, and ensure your content is a step above the textbooks.
- Create group activities for your learners
Sometimes with elearning you sacrifice the group energy you get from an in-person classroom, which helps with motivation to remain focused on the course in some settings. But you can still make use of group energy by including group activities in your elearning instructional design. You can classify your learners into groups for group assignments using Forums and other online social collaboration tools. There are many tools to create an online community that learners can tap into to remain motivated on taking your course. Often times, the best place to do this is where your learners currently are, even if that means creating a group on Facebook or Google, or starting a hashtag on Instagram or Twitter. You may also team up learners into small teams for assignments that show real-time results and reward the winning team. This will create competition among teams and individual learners, which will help with motivating each learner to be committed to the course.
- Use interactive content
Although this may seem obvious, too much PowerPoint can have a negative impact on learning. To energize your online class makes use of a mixture of videos and PowerPoint presentations with learner activities. In some live conferencing tools, you can also make use of real-time features such as quizzes, live annotation tools, and Q&A panels. These tools make it possible to interact with learners more easily and especially when you feel the energy is low. Giving live classes via a webcam may also help motivate your learners. Rather than sending your prerecorded videos, you can also consider giving a number of live classes via webcam to increase interaction in your class or training session.
- Use Humor and stories
Humor helps liven up a learning environment, be it online or even the traditional classroom. Infusing humor in your content can help improve your audience attention and engagement. Learn to use storytelling in your presentation as these two when used correctly can bring the best out of the learners. Humor helps humanize the instructor in an online class and thus create a special bond between the learners and their instructor. Using stories in your presentation can also help build trust with your learners which will effectively endear them to your classes. You should, however, be careful with how you use humor and storytelling in your lessons. Too much humor can eat up your time, and the wrong kind of humor can be off-putting.
