Improve Courses With Original Engagement Tactics
If you’re an educator, chances are you already know the core principles of creating effective courses on platforms for online learning. But if you’re aiming for enhanced learner engagement, a little creativity goes a long way. To help you deliver more captivating learning experiences and keep your audiences hooked, we’ve brought together 5 unconventional and lesser-known course building tips. They’re easy to implement and improve as you develop your educational programs.
5 Course Building Tips For Higher Engagement
1. Create A Learning “Series” With Cliffhangers
Have you ever watched an episode of a great TV show that ended with a massive cliffhanger that left you on the edge of your seat wondering what’s coming up next for days afterward? You can do the same with your courses.
Break your course content into episodes with suspenseful endings to keep learners curious and eager to come back for more. Here are some ways you can do this:
- End a course chapter with an unanswered question. Pose a thought-provoking question or hint at a major concept that learners will explore in the next chapter or module. For example, “What happens when a key stakeholder disagrees with your proposal? Find out in the next lesson.”
- Tease future benefits or insights. Let your learners know what they’ll discover—make sure to tie it back to their big-picture goals. For example, “In the next chapter, you’ll find out how to overcome the most common customer objective with a single simple strategy—don’t miss it!”
- Introduce a cliffhanger scenario. Conclude with a dilemma or incomplete storyline that leaves learners wanting to resolve it. For example, “Your team just discovered a major error in the project—what will you do next?”
The best way to incorporate cliffhangers in course creation is by using branching scenarios. In iSpring Suite, a PowerPoint-based authoring tool for educators, you can build learning journeys with branching routes throughout the learning content. They challenge the user to make decisions and move forward according to the consequences of the choices they make.
An example of a branching scenario in iSpring Suite.
Branching with cliffhangers is not only great for keeping learners coming back for more knowledge but also helps them practice skills in a gamified environment. This allows them to apply these skills to real-life scenarios and situations.
2. Add Social Media-Style Videos
Inspired by the attention-grabbing style of social media, short, dynamic videos attract learners in the same way they’re drawn to Instagram Reels or TikToks. In other words, micro-videos mimic the dopamine-driven engagement that learners get from scrolling through social platforms.
You don’t have to be a social media influencer to produce great short video content. In fact, you can turn your existing video lessons into TikTok-like content in a few steps:
- Break your existing video lessons down into their most impactful, insightful, or engaging snippets, keeping each segment under 60 seconds.
- Enrich them with jump-cuts, visual effects, and dynamic transitions to make the videos more visually engaging.
- Select upbeat, royalty-free tracks or trending sounds to add energy.
- Add captions to enhance accessibility.
- Ensure that your videos are vertically oriented, easy to view on small screens, and maintain high quality when compressed for mobile devices.
Pro tip: Spot social media trends like fresh memes or background music tracks and incorporate them into your videos to make your learning content feel current and relatable.
3. Use Surprise Mechanics
Nothing prevents learners from getting bored better than random twists and pop-ups in your course content. This can be practically anything:
- Small rewards
- Bonus content
- “Easter eggs”
- Progress milestone celebrations, etc.
These surprises gamify the entire learning experience and allow learners to feel more invested and motivated. At the same time, you as an educator get to reinforce key concepts in a fun, engaging way while tracking learner progress through their interactions with these unexpected elements.
You can place these surprises strategically throughout the course, such as at the start of a module to grab attention, midway through a lesson to re-engage learners, at key milestones to reward progress, or at the end of the course to leave a lasting impression.
A pop-up interactive quiz in a fire safety course built in iSpring Suite.
So, the next time you create a course, consider adding hidden slides or unexpected pop-up quizzes to your content and see how these surprises increase learner engagement and knowledge retention.
4. Crowdsource Content From Your Learners
This approach is inspired by user-generated content (UGC), a tactic used widely in social media marketing. Essentially, you can turn learners into co-creators: invite them to share their insights, create micro-courses, or collaboratively edit content.
Here’s how you can incorporate this strategy:
- Encourage learners to design short lessons on a specific subtopic they’re knowledgeable about.
- Use surveys, polls, or idea boards where learners can suggest improvements, additional topics, or creative approaches to your existing courses.
- Use discussion boards or live webinars to gather learners’ perspectives on a topic, then curate their ideas into supplementary course materials.
Crowdsourcing content and ideas from learners will give you a new perspective on how they approach the subject matter, allowing you to create more relevant and impactful learning courses. Besides, they’ll gain valuable experience in turning their knowledge into educational content. This contributes to a shared learning environment, which deepens learner engagement and gives students a sense of agency in the educational process.
Pro tip: You don’t need to purchase multiple seats in an authoring tool to engage your learners in a collaborative course creation experience. Tools like iSpring Suite offer a free trial period, so you can run a team project at no extra cost, helping students create effective educational content from scratch.
5. Incorporate FOMO
FOMO stands for “fear of missing out,” a psychological trigger that compels people to act quickly to avoid missing unique opportunities or experiences. You can use it in the context of course creation by offering exclusive content or educational insights your learners won’t want to pass up.
To take advantage of FOMO, you can introduce:
- Time-sensitive challenges or quizzes.
- Limited access to resources for completing an assignment.
- Early-bird content for learners who start the course within a certain timeframe, etc.
Creating a time-sensitive quiz in iSpring Suite.
These FOMO-based course enhancements increase urgency and engagement, encouraging learners to make an extra effort for a reward. On top of that, they create a sense of exclusivity and achievement, which boosts learner satisfaction.
Final Word
Sometimes, all it takes to spark learner engagement and increase motivation is an extra activity or reward your audience didn’t expect. This is exactly what the 5 tactics on the list can help you achieve. And the best part? You don’t have to reinvent your learning content—simply add a new element or enhance your existing materials with the tips above.
So, go ahead and experiment with these learner engagement tactics in your future or current courses. And if you need some inspiration, why not schedule a demo of iSpring Suite? An iSpring course design expert will walk you through the tool’s capabilities, show you samples of actual courses created by our users, and help you bring your educational content ideas to life quickly and easily.
iSpring Suite
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