5 Key Components To A Successful Online Course

To ensure high engagement and easy access to course materials, career colleges must select the right platform for their online courses.

Online courses have been implemented in schools across the country to protect students, faculty, and staff from the COVID-19 pandemic. If your school is considering implementing online courses, you may be unsure where to begin.

While online courses can be highly customized to meet individual delivery preferences, there are a few key elements that contribute to an online course’s success. The following are the five most important elements of a successful online course.

1. Choosing an appropriate platform for a successful online course

Without a dependable course platform, your school will be unable to deliver successful online courses. You must be confident that it will not malfunction or crash while classes are in session.

The platform you select must also include the features you require for your courses. For example, if you want instructors to record each class session they teach so that students can rewatch them later, make sure the platform you choose supports recording.

2. High-level participation

Because students are not in the same physical location as the instructor, they are more likely to become bored, or worse, distracted! As a result, online courses must be extremely engaging and interesting. There are numerous strategies for increasing student engagement in online classes. Coursewide chats, polls, and assessments, for example, keep students engaged in the class session.

Keep in mind that text-heavy presentations are tedious! When it comes to learning materials, keep visual appeal in mind. Online instruction provides instructors with an excellent opportunity to incorporate online resources into their class materials. There are numerous online resources available to engage students, improve comprehension, and enrich class sessions, including videos, articles, interactive models, and more.

3. Simple accessibility to course materials

Having a platform where students can easily access class presentations and supplemental course materials is a key component of successful online courses, whether your school has an LMS or not.

4. Ensure accurate attendance tracking

Verifying that students are logging in as themselves and participating in online course sessions is critical, especially for schools that use clock hours. Attendance tracking methods such as assignment submission or email verification do not accurately reflect how long students were present in the session. By allowing students to check themselves in and out with secure user verification, an attendance solution like CourseKey can accurately track how long a student was in the session.

5. Online office hours

When instructors give a presentation to the entire class, they may not have time to answer individual students’ questions. Setting aside a specific time of day or week to host virtual office hours is critical to the success of online courses. Giving students the option of spending one-on-one time with instructors to get extra help and have their questions answered can have a huge impact on their understanding. Virtual office hours can provide students with clarity and extra interaction that can sometimes be lost when communicating primarily via text or email.

Making the Transition to a Successful Online Course

Many schools across the country have adopted online learning as the norm. Adopt all of the key components listed above to ensure the success of your online course.