Here are a few tips on what you can do as online educators to keep your students engaged and interested:

Built Rapport

The first step in online teaching should always be rapport-building. It is very hard to encourage a student that you are not able to connect with. This does not mean that you have to be close buddies in order for you to be an effective teacher, but students have to be comfortable with you for them to be able to open up and receive easily.

In order to achieve this, set apart a time during your lessons to get to know your student, make small talk, discover your students’ likes and dislikes, etc. However, make sure that this does not take too long or students might feel that they are being short-changed.

Provide as Many Visual Aids as Possible

Because you are limited to text chat, audio chat or video calling, there is a big difference in the amount of things that you can do while teaching. This entails that you have to be more creative than most when coming up with teaching aids and lesson ideas.

One of the things that can help engage your students during the lesson is the use of appropriate interactive visual aids or materials. This means that you should not be simply talking most of the time. There has to be materials that students can download and use for the lesson so that it would be easier for them to follow discussions or understand ideas that you present to them.

Make Lessons Relevant to Everyday Situations

There are certain lessons or topics that are already very much relevant to society, everyday issues, etc., and so in these cases you don’t have to exert too much effort to make connections between the significance of the lesson and actual life situations. But topics like grammar can sometimes be thought of as not too relevant in actual life.

To make sure that your lessons are engaging, present life applications that will illustrate the importance of lessons learned to students’ success in whatever field it is that they are involved in. The more relevant the lessons are to actual life situations, the more the students will feel motivated to learn them.