Natasha Shetty
Writer | Blogger

The success of any teacher, tutor, or coach depends upon how quickly and swiftly a student masters the subject. We’re all aware that online learning is fast becoming popular across the world, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

As a result, we can expect that online lessons will play a major role in education during 2021 and beyond.

While online classes help students to ensure they don’t miss an academic year, it also comes with some flipsides.

Flipsides of Online Classes

A teacher can’t interact personally and physically with a student or a group of learners during online classes. Hence, there’re chances that a student might not learn the subject well.

Secondly, long hours at home means more time spent watching TV or playing online games and other fruitless activities. These can play havoc with the ability to learn, especially if a student isn’t able to focus on lessons during online classes. Furthermore, a large number of teachers lack adequate skills to shift their offline classes to online platforms, using webcams and various kinds of software.

Ways to Make Online Lessons Fun & Engaging

There’s only one way that teachers and tutors can overcome the above problems. And that’s by making lessons fun and engaging in an online class. There’re several best ways to make online lessons fun and engaging, without exerting much effort.

And doing so has two distinct advantages for teachers. Firstly, making online lessons fun and engaging helps students to learn quicker and helps teachers create a superb reputation for themselves. Secondly, it could help them get the necessary skills to earn a lucrative side-income or even work full-time as online tutors for an e-learning portal.

Therefore, here’re some excellent ways that any teacher could use to make lessons fun and engaging during an online class.

Use Storytelling for Interest

Regardless of the age of your students, everyone loves listening to stories and personal experiences. In fact, weaving your lessons around relevant real-life stories or even fictional ones does help to make lessons fun and engaging in an online class. You could also narrate your own experiences in learning that subject. Tell them how you overcame difficulties in learning a particular topic and why it’s important to learn the subject. Teach them the same methods you would use to master a topic by narrating your experiences. Add some interesting incidences with your teachers, if possible.

Interaction Works Wonders

While the interaction between a teacher and students is part of offline or classroom teaching, this important element suffers a lot when it comes to online classes. However, the latest software including Zoom makes it possible for every teacher to interact with students online. You can actively interact with students during online classes in two ways to make lessons fun and engaging. One is by allowing students to “raise hands” during the online class and allowing them to ask questions. The other is allotting a few minutes between and at the end of the online class for an interactive session. Both these ways work wonders. It’s also possible to ask questions to students during the class and get answers to increase interaction.

Dispense that Newsreader Style

Unfortunately, lots of online teachers make great mistakes during lessons. They merely share the screen and their own video. I call this the “newsreader style” because of its sheer monotony. Instead, use a whiteboard and use that too as though you’re in a physical classroom. You can get someone to zoom the camera out and in when you show something on a whiteboard or blackboard. This helps to give the students a real-life classroom experience. Also, this breaks the monotony of seeing your image and screen-shares of the lesson. It also helps remove some predictability from your lessons, which serves to engage students. Since they know you’ll use the blackboard or whiteboard anytime, they would generally be more interested and attentive.

Conduct Quizzes about Your Lessons

Conducting quiz contests for your students every week is yet another way to make lessons engaging and fun during an online class. Regardless of whether you’re teaching a single student or more, quiz competitions about your lessons encourage them to learn more. Furthermore, it helps develop that spirit of healthy competition among students, which is also a vital life skill and can prove useful later. Depending upon the number of students, you could divide them into two or three groups for the quiz contest. One of the advantages of such quiz contests is that it helps an online teacher to find out whether any student lags in learning and pay some extra attention to cover the gap. Also, add a few general knowledge questions about your lesson to make it more interesting. This helps students to look for answers outside your lessons.

Smaller Lessons Help

Understandably, every teacher has deadlines to complete lessons. However, try and fit in as many smaller lessons as possible during online classes. This helps students to understand better. They’ll not be overloaded with information and can learn quickly. And if there’re no such deadlines, it’s possible to extend your classes by a week or two, as long as you’re sure about getting attention from the students and keeping them engaged. One of the flipsides of smaller but more lessons is that students tend to get bored and might not be as attentive during the online class. However, some of the above methods should help any online teacher overcome these inherent shortcomings.

More Ways to Make Lessons Fun & Engaging

There’re few more ways to make lessons fun and engaging during an online class. One is being sensitive to students. Obviously, not every student might be able to keep pace with learning. And some may have specific needs. Helping such students attracts better interaction.

Another tip you could try: provide interesting projects about your lessons to students. They could complete these projects alone or as groups. This also adds fun to your online lessons and keeps students engaged.

In Conclusion

Getting to know some background about your online students can help a lot in making classes fun and engaging. Because you’ll be able to address the specific needs of every student and learn the strengths and weaknesses of some. This can help you to modify or adapt online lessons in a manner that suits every student, regardless of their learning abilities. At the same time, it’s also good to let students know a bit about you. They should know their online teacher is easy to learn with and would go that extra mile to help them learn a subject properly. These tips could help you make the most of online teaching.

About Natasha Shetty

Natasha Shetty is passionate about blogging and writing. She fondly calls it “the art of words”. She is unique and so is her content. Blogging about education and ideas to grow is something that she loves doing.

View all posts by Natasha Shetty here.

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