Are your students lacking motivation? Tips to 'virtually' refuel

It is now obvious that for most students, the rest of the academic year will need to be studied at home. To help them prepare for their exams, it is important that your institution knows how to engage with students to keep their motivation levels up.

Suddenly having to adapt your communication skills to work remotely is difficult and can become tiring trying to think of new ways to engage your students. We have put together a list of tips to re-engage your pupils this term, even whilst in a global pandemic.
Communication
Are you connecting with your students live? There are many free tools available to give live video lessons which give you the option to record them for students to watch later too.
Tribal Engage, a dedicated mobile app for education, gives students personalised information at their fingertips and allows teachers and students to connect, communicate and collaborate securely. Since lock-down, engagement has gone up by 700%.

Ensure there is opportunity for collaboration during your teaching. Tools such as Google Docs and Slides allow students to collaborate and communicate in real time – it will also ensure students stay engaged if there are frequent quizzes throughout.

Think of inventive ways to deliver classes that are more exciting than the distractions around students. Examples could be:

• Ask students to watch videos or listen to podcasts before a class so they can report back live.
• Create tutorials and short lessons that can be emailed to students, ensure you are maintaining your presence.
• Design opportunities for hands-on learning, subjects such as environmental studies, engineering and cookery can be taught in the home.
• Reach out to other tutors and colleagues.

They are all going through this transition too and sharing tips with each other can help you with both lesson planning and connecting with other tutors.

Schedule
Stick to a schedule that works best for yourself and your students. Providing consistency at a time of such uncertainty will help both parties to feel at ease about lesson plans.

Motivate
Keeping students motivated, especially remotely, is hard. By setting clear goals for individuals gives students a purpose and they can communicate these goals with family members so there is a clear end goal for everyone to work towards.

A good way of keeping students motivated is by creating regular, shorter bursts of motivation, as well as recognising milestones and celebrating. This could be through sharing a celebratory virtual video, sending a certificate, or acknowledging students’ success during a live class.
Finally, be realistic. It is not expected that everything that can be covered in a classroom can be covered virtually. Providing a set schedule that is engaging and aligned to key standards that is clear to follow is the most important right now. As we learn more about how remote learning works, we can do it better, because even after the current crisis is over, we may need to do it again.

To find out more about Engage and education, listen to our recent webinar on the subject matter to understand how we can help you communicate with your students easily.