Improve your courses with unique engagement strategies
If you’re an educator, chances are you already know the basic principles of creating effective courses on online learning platforms. But if you’re aiming to increase learner engagement, a little creativity can go a long way. To provide a more engaging learning experience and keep your audience engaged, we’ve compiled five unconventional and lesser-known course building tips. Easy to implement and improve when developing educational programs.
5 course building tips to increase engagement
1. Create a learning “series” with cliffhangers
Have you ever had an episode of a great TV show end on a massive cliffhanger, leaving you sitting on the edge of your seat for days afterwards wondering what would happen next? You can do the same with The Course.
Divide your course content into episodes with suspenseful endings to keep learners curious and want to come back for more. There are several ways to do this:
End course chapters with unanswered questions. Ask thought-provoking questions or hint at key concepts that learners will explore in the next chapter or module. For example, “What happens if a key stakeholder doesn’t agree with your proposal? Find out in the next lesson.” Hint at future benefits or insights. Let your learners know what they will discover. Be sure to tie it back to your larger goals. For example, “In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to overcome the most common customer goals with one simple strategy. Don’t miss it!” Introduce a cliffhanger scenario. It ends with a dilemma or an incomplete story that the learner wants to solve. For example, “Your team discovered a critical error in a project. What do you do next?”
The best way to incorporate cliffhangers into your course creation is with branching scenarios. iSpring Suite, a PowerPoint-based authoring tool for educators, lets you build learning journeys with branching routes throughout your learning content. They ask users to make decisions and move forward according to the consequences of their choices.
An example branching scenario for iSpring Suite.
Branches with cliffhangers are great for keeping learners coming back for more knowledge, as well as helping them practice their skills in a gamified environment. This allows you to apply these skills to real-life scenarios and situations.
2. Add social media style videos
Inspired by social media’s attention-grabbing style, short, dynamic videos engage learners in the same way that Instagram Reels and TikTok engage. In other words, microvideos mimic the dopamine-driven engagement that learners get from scrolling through social platforms.
You don’t have to be a social media influencer to create great short video content. In fact, you can turn your existing video lessons into TikTok-like content in a few steps.
Divide your existing video lessons into the most impactful, insightful, or engaging snippets, keeping each segment under 60 seconds. Add jump cuts, visual effects, and dynamic transitions to make your videos more visually appealing. Choose royalty-free upbeat tracks and trending sounds to cheer you up. Add captions to increase accessibility. Make sure your video is vertically oriented, easy to view on small screens, and maintains high quality when compressed for mobile devices.
Pro tip: Find social media trends like fresh memes and background music tracks and incorporate them into your videos to keep your learning content current and relatable.
3. Use the surprise mechanism
Nothing prevents learner boredom like random twists and pop-ups in your course content. This can actually be anything.
Small rewards Bonus content “Easter eggs” Progress milestone celebrations etc.
These surprises gamify the entire learning experience and help learners feel more focused and engaged. At the same time, educators can track learner progress through interactions with these unexpected elements while reinforcing key concepts in a fun and engaging way.
These surprises can be used strategically throughout the course to grab attention at the beginning of a module, re-engage learners mid-lesson, reward progress at key milestones, or linger at the end of the course. can be placed in impression.
Pop-up interactive quizzes for fire safety courses built into iSpring Suite.
So the next time you create a course, consider adding hidden slides or unexpected pop-up quizzes to your content and see how these surprises increase learner engagement and knowledge retention. Please.
4. Crowdsource content from learners
This approach takes inspiration from user-generated content (UGC), a tactic widely used in social media marketing. Essentially, you can turn your learners into co-creators. This means you can invite learners to share insights, create microcourses, and co-author content.
Here’s how to incorporate this strategy:
Encourage learners to design short lessons on specific subtopics they are knowledgeable about. Using surveys, polls, or idea boards, learners can suggest improvements, additional topics, and creative approaches to existing courses. Use discussion boards and live webinars to gather learner perspectives on topics and synthesize their ideas into supplemental course materials.
Crowdsourcing content and ideas from learners provides new perspectives on how learners approach subject matter, allowing you to create more relevant and effective learning courses. . Additionally, you will gain valuable experience in turning knowledge into educational content. This contributes to a shared learning environment, deepens learner engagement, and gives students a sense of ownership in the educational process.
Pro tip: You don’t need to purchase multiple seats in your authoring tool to engage your learners in a collaborative course creation experience. Tools like iSpring Suite offer free trials that allow you to run team projects at no additional cost and allow your students to create effective educational content from scratch.
5. Build in FOMO
FOMO stands for “fear of missing out” and is a psychological trigger that forces people to act quickly to avoid missing out on unique opportunities and experiences. You can use this in the context of course creation by providing unique content and educational insights that your learners won’t want to miss.
To take advantage of FOMO, you can implement the following:
Timed assignments and quizzes. You have limited access to resources to complete your assignment. For example, early content for learners who start a course within a certain period of time.
Create timed quizzes with iSpring Suite.
These FOMO-based course reinforcements increase urgency and engagement, encouraging learners to go the extra mile for rewards. In addition, it creates a sense of specialness and accomplishment, increasing learner satisfaction.
last word
Sometimes all you need to spark learner engagement and increase motivation is an extra activity or a reward your audience didn’t expect. This is exactly what the five tactics listed will help you accomplish. And the best part? There’s no need to recreate learning content. Simply use the tips above to add new elements or enhance existing material.
So try these learner engagement strategies in your upcoming or current courses. Need some inspiration? Why not schedule a demo of iSpring Suite? An iSpring course design expert will explain the tool’s features, show examples of real courses created by users, and teach We help you bring your content ideas to life quickly and easily.
i spring suite
All-in-one software solution for creating versatile learning content and teamwork for e-learning projects. It’s very easy to use. No coding or design skills required.
