Why Participation Is Important in Online Learning

Participation in all education learning environments is essential, most significantly because it reinforces the concepts you’re teaching. While students absorb information from traditional lectures and readings, learners can also benefit from additional educational models like discussion-based lessons, which lend themselves perfectly to taking place on your class website.

Open discussion can be helpful in many ways. Hearing from your students enables you to gauge how well they’re retaining the content you’re teaching them. This can help you to pinpoint areas that may need additional reinforcement and gives you an opportunity to help those students who need assistance.

Participation also gives students a chance to hear other viewpoints from their classmates regarding the course content. This enables them to respectfully challenge each other’s views and provides opportunities for growth and learning that might not otherwise present themselves. When it comes to virtual learning, this sharing and connecting outside of the classroom may also help students feel more connected to each other. Instead of learning in a silo, so to speak, online discussions provide more social outlets for interaction that could lead to them forming their own study groups or developing new friendships. If students know you expect them to participate, they may be more likely to prepare for class.

4 Ways to Maximize Student Participation in Online Learning

We’ve gone over why participation is crucial for online learning and looked at some of the reasons why it can be hard to maintain. Now let’s explore some strategies for maximizing student participation in a virtual learning environment.

1. Foster Deep Online Discussions

You can use the Forums plugin to install a discussion board in any post or page on your class website

After reviewing the lesson material, ask students to create a post to discuss something they’ve learned or answer questions you’ve asked. Once they have submitted their responses, pupils should comment on at least two of their peer submissions. This format can contribute to more in-depth conversations and thinking.

Taking these discussions online provides a notable advantage. Students have more time to carefully consider and craft thoughtful responses. The format may also help shy students express opinions in more detail than they would in person.

As the facilitator, you’ll want to give clear expectations for course discussions. This includes written guidelines for how often students should post, as well as due dates to keep the conversation on track. You also can provide a minimum word count for responses.

When providing questions or prompts, be sure they lend themselves to discussions and relate back to the course content. Provocative, open-ended prompts that require critical thinking will be more likely to engender interesting conversations than questions that check for factual recall.

You could also use this concept for your class blog. Present your lesson material and questions in the form of a blog post and then ask students to craft their own posts or comments responding to what they have learned. They can add comments on each other’s content as part of the exercise. Chime in with actionable, timely feedback to keep the conversation flowing. The Content Update Notification plugin can help you stay on top of this:

Lively, frequently updated discussions are more likely to entice students to participate.

2. Make Video Lectures More Engaging

Whether your lectures are live-streamed or recorded, there are ways to increase student engagement. If you use a lot of video content to teach, you’ll want to make it easy for students to access what they need.