Social learning assists in motivating students to learn more by generating curiosity. If you are an online educator, you can take help from various social learning strategies to engage your students with your course content.
Curiosity! It might be a simple word for you. But actually, it means a lot for students in gaining education. Until students are not curious to explore more, you can’t make them engaged with your course content. And, this curiosity can be generated among students through social learning. When they are in groups, they can interact more. When they interact more, they can discuss topics. And, when they start a discussion, they can start understanding the concept rather than just reading and cramming to pass the exam.
Surprisingly, an introvert person can also benefit when he is in groups interacting with the mentors or the batchmates. Hope you got the point!
While online education makes learners feel isolated, being a part of social learning is really important. However, there are many ways to engage your students with your online course material, these social learning strategies can prove beneficial for learners to create meaningful connections with their peer group. Let them motivate to keep moving ahead with their bright future.
Top Social Learning Strategies You Should Try
So, here are some of the best social learning strategies that you can apply to engage your learners with your online course material and motivate them to understand the concept properly.
1. Encourage Students Involvement In Your LMS forum
The more is the involvement, the more they can engage. The more they engage, the more they learn.
It’s obvious!
I’m assuming you are taking advantage of LMS Forums on your eLearning website. And, if you have still not integrated LMS forms with your site, do consider it right now. For all LearnDash users, here is an LMS Forum Plugin wpForo LearnDash that offers a simple and intuitive way to create discussion forums on LearnDash powered eLearning website.
2. Create Groups Depending On The Niches
A better social connection can be made between learners when they interact with the ones who have common interests. Creating smaller social learning groups based on the learners’ niches is, no doubt, one of the amazing social learning strategies.
Let’s understand it in a different way.
Say you have formed a common group for all. Although this allows your learners to discuss their issues and share their views, it would become difficult for you to manage group members and address their issues as and when more and more members will join.
To be proactive, make niche forums and encourage each of your learners to take active participation in the groups formed.
3. Create Healthy Competition Among Your Learners
With LMS forums, you can create discussion groups within your eLearning website. And, by creating healthy competition, you can take advantage of your forums in real terms.
Gamification in education is a powerful way to do this. There are many ways you can use gamification on your site. For example, ask your learners to create a project of what they are learning from your course material. Ask them to complete assignments before the deadline. Award the winner in front of others. This recognition in the group will boost their confidence and encourage them to give their best of the best.
4. Encourage Learners To Give Presentation
Remember your college days when you were asked to give a presentation on a particular topic in front of your collegemates. You may understand the benefit you got by standing and speaking in front of that crowd.
The same strategy you can follow here in your LMS Forum. Distribute topics among the group and schedule date and time for the presentation. Reward the one whom you think performed well.
5. Offer Q & A Sessions
Offering Q & A session is one of the most used and powerful social learning strategies.
Asking questions from experts assist in clearing doubts and encouraging proper communication among students and mentors. It helps instructors getting an in-depth understanding of how their learners grab the concepts.
It’s Your Turn To Incorporate Social Learning Techniques!
Don’t get worried if you failed in the first attempt. The journey didn’t come to an end. Keep trying these social learning strategies and I’m pretty sure, you can create a stronger community of committed learners or maybe even better than that.
And, don’t forget to respond posts regularly in your forum.
Anything else you would like to add? Do leave a comment below with your suggestions.
