Best Practices: 5 Design Strategies to Engage Your Students

Engaging students in fresh and interesting ways is definitely a challenge in person—and it’s arguably even more so in the online classroom. Here are some design strategies that you can use in Moodle™ and Joule to engage your students.

1. Incorporate Videos to Foster Forum Discussions

Videos can be a great way to engage many students with multiple learning styles and preferences. Try using videos as a way to generate online discussion. Post the video into the Forum Introduction area when creating the forum, and instruct students to post their reactions. Make sure you are using relevant videos.

2. Give Students Permission to Rate Each Other’s Forum Posts

If you’re not yet using forums, try adding them to your courses. They spark discussion and interactivity within the classroom. If you’re already using forums, consider adding an additional level of interactivity by allowing students to rate the quality of each other’s work. To do this, you’ll need to alter the activity’s permissions to allow students to rate each other’s responses. Then establish your own grading scale that awards students points anytime they rate another student’s post.

RELATED READING | ‘9 Great eLearning Authoring Tools (2023 Update)’

3. Create an Interactive Scenario Based on a Case Study

Present students with a case study and pose questions to them in a Lesson activity. Create an interactive learning experience by branching into various learning paths based on the user’s selection. Alternatively, you could use the Essay question type to allow the student to type their response and then after submission present them with an ideal response for comparison.

4. Add a Workshop and Require Peer Assessment

The Workshop activity allows students to create their own projects and allows for peer assessment (when enabled). Peer assessment is a great way to involve students in the evaluative process. It engages them in critical thinking and collaboration while enabling them to send and receive constructive feedback to and from their peers.

5. Evaluate, Evaluate, Evaluate!

There are so many different evaluation options in Moodle™. The Quiz activity is an obvious choice, but there are other activities available in Moodle™ that are also worth considering. Try adding a Choice activity to poll students’ knowledge prior to a lesson, or let students choose the focus of an upcoming class project. You can also use the Feedback block to create your own questions and gather input from your students to evaluate the success and engagement of course activities.

ENGAGE YOUR STUDENTS | ‘5 Ways Open LMS’s Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) Enhances Online Education’