How much effort does your educational institution put in each year to create a buzz around back-to-school? It’s an exciting time for the students, with new classrooms, new classmates, new clubs to choose from, and brand-new lockers. It’s a honeymoon period for everyone, but it doesn’t last long. After all, the novelty of a fresh start will wear off, and the drudgery of traditional education will take hold sooner or later. But driving academic outcomes requires sustained learner engagement. So, how do you keep students engaged throughout the school year? Online eLearning platforms could be the answer.
Traditional Educational Paradigms Can’t Sustain Enthusiasm
Traditional education focuses on a one-size-fits-all approach. Even worse, it turns students into passive recipients of information, with the teacher doing all the work to keep learners engaged and motivated. Some of the other reasons why traditional education delivery cannot keep the high energy at the start of the school year going include:
- Inability to sustain attention: Long lectures, endless reading lists, and passive listening lead to boredom, with research showing that students experience boredom 50% of the time during each subject hour.
- Inflexible and restrictive: Traditional pedagogy does not take into account individual learning needs, styles, or preferences. A rigid curriculum and pre-set schedule leave no opportunity for students to explore subjects of their interest, quite unlike what you can achieve with a personalized learning platform for educational institutions.
- Lacks relevance: When repetition and memorization are prioritized over understanding and real-world applications, education loses relevance. It fails to prepare students for real life with adaptable skills, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity. This not only leads to boredom, but also limits learners’ ability to maximize their potential.
- Doesn’t prepare students for the future: Over 50% of the jobs that today’s students will get hired for by 2030 do not exist yet. Traditional education fails to take into account the skills needed to succeed in a rapidly changing world because it focuses on the past rather than the future.
A seismic shift in focus is required for education to build consistent engagement through technology and personalization. Online elearning platforms can support educators, educational publishers, policymakers, and edtechs to plan beyond the initial back-to-school enthusiasm.
Sustaining Student Engagement with Online eLearning Platforms
As far back as 2007, neurologist Dr. Judy Willis published a paper titled “The Neuroscience of Joyful Education,” which revealed that students who have fun in their educational environment are more likely to retain information and succeed than those who don’t. Almost two decades on, research is now looking for the best technology support for joyful learning, such as mobile digital learning solutions. Digital eLearning platforms offer multiple ways to sustain engagement and improve learning outcomes.
1. Personalized Learning
Personalized learning platforms allow educational institutions to facilitate learning at each student’s own pace, based on their learning style, level, goals, and content format preferences. Plus, when these platforms come equipped with an AI-powered personal learning assistant, students can access 24/7 support, content recommendations, instant feedback, and constant motivation to progress along the learning path. Online eLearning platforms also give access to powerful learning analytics, which educators can leverage to curate personalized learning paths for each student, based on their specific strengths and weaknesses.
2. Interactive Learning Experiences
Integrating multimedia and gaming elements into learning materials can enhance and sustain engagement in the long term. Interactive solution-seeking, video, audio, badges, leaderboards, collaboration tools, and project-based learning go a long way to make learning experiences immersive while strengthening knowledge and skill acquisition.
3. Flexibility for Inclusivity and Accessibility
Online elearning platforms allow any-time, anywhere learning, with online and offline access to learning materials, accommodating the needs of students with unreliable or poor access to devices and internet connectivity. In addition, features such as multilingual support, captioning, speech-to-text, read-aloud, etc., go a long way to ensure inclusivity and accessibility.
4. Real-Time Assessments and Feedback
AI-powered online learning solutions enable students to complete assessments in real time or at their own convenience, while providing instant feedback. This feedback goes much beyond simply sharing a final score. Students gain insights into areas of improvement, while teachers can provide personalized support and timely interventions to enhance academic outcomes.
Preparing for Year-Round Engagement with Online eLearning Platforms
Educational institutions can leverage personalized learning platforms to plan for year-round student engagement.
- Planning for Fall: Individual and group assignments, projects that offer hands-on experience, formative assessments, and more can be planned in advance. Students can discover the various activities as they progress along the lesson plan and complete each assignment asynchronously, if required. Plus, formative assessments can help provide insights into areas of focus in each subject.
- Strategies to Prevent Learning Loss During the Winter Break: While you don’t want to keep students away from their families during the holiday season, you also don’t want learning gaps to develop. This is the time to focus on personalized skill-building through fun activities and gamification.
- Strengthening Learning in Spring: This is the time to build on the knowledge acquired through the school year through personalized revision plans, peer learning experiences through group projects, test prep, etc.
- Continued Learning in Summer: The summer break is a good time for enrichment activities. Offer summer programs that address student interests, personalized skill building, and more. But remember to keep things fun and interesting.
MagicBox™ is an AI-powered online eLearning platform that eases content creation, distribution, teaching, and learning. With powerful tools for course creation, assessment creation and implementation, student collaboration, learning analytics, and much more, it powers educational institutions, publishers, and edtech firms with the means to sustain student engagement throughout the school year. Schedule a demo to explore the platform and learn how it can power academic achievement.
