4 Tips To Attract More Students To Your Online Course
Online courses have become the trend in education during the recent pandemic. The reason is that an online course essentially delivers the same learning experience and outcomes as a physical classroom course, but with added convenience and lower costs.
Not just this, but the fact that online courses are accessible for everyone, from everywhere ensures that the potential audience for such courses is huge. However, at the same time, it can be quite difficult for educators and course instructors to stand out since there are countless online courses out there.
In this blog post, we present you with 4 effective strategies that will help you attract students on a recurring basis for your online courses.
Provide useful course material
One of the most successful strategies for getting students to remember you is through the course material. Additional course material can improve a student’s experience with your course by helping them understand your course content better. Such material adds much-needed details to your video lectures that enhance the overall learning experience for the students, and thus, helps them remember you.
Therefore, it is recommended apart from your video lectures, you should provide students with a wide variety of course materials. You can add lecture notes, presentations, practice questions and exams, and e-books to enrich your online course. Generally, anything that supports your course content with more detail or supplements your video lectures is a must-have for online courses these days.
Here is a great example of course material in an undergraduate Algebra course from MIT OpenCourseware. They provide students with assignments, study materials (notes), and reading material to help improve their learning.
Bundle courses by expertise and track
If you specialize in a specific niche or knowledge area, then bundling courses by track and expertise is a great way to retain and attract students. For instance, if you offer JavaScript programming courses, you can start with a JavaScript course for beginners that teaches the basic concepts and then offer another advanced JavaScript course that dives into complex topics and subject areas.
Here is an example of how Pluralsight offers and bundles courses for different skill levels:
Alternatively, you can also bundle similar courses to help students specialize in a particular subject area. Continuing our example above, if you offer a JavaScript programming course, you can bundle that with an HTML or CSS course to offer a web development bundle to your students.
Here is an example of such specialization bundles by Coursera:
Here are some tips to keep in mind when bundling courses:
Be sure to divide courses adequately so that there is enough valuable content in each course. A beginner course should not include complex concepts, so as to leave little to no value for an advanced course. Similarly, an advanced course should not reiterate basic concepts to ensure that the beginner course is still good for students who want to ‘refresh’ their concepts.
Include a link or reference to your other related courses at the end of each course to make sure that students know you offer similar courses in the subject area.
Offer certificates on course completion
Students love to be appreciated and recognized for the hard work they put into a course. This recognition can be in the form of words of praise from the instructor or a certificate that acknowledges their achievement. Certificates can be an important factor for students on whether they want to enroll in another course with you or not.
But nothing attracts students to a course more than knowing that they will receive a certificate recognizing their skill (since it can help in job applications and interviews). Consider offering certificates to students who successfully complete (and pass) your course.
Here is an example of a certificate issued by Udemy to one of its students:
The important aspect here is that your certificates should be of high-quality, signed (digitally if you will not print them), and well-designed. A professional-looking certificate will make you stand out from amateur educators and increase your credibility to students. But you don’t have to worry about designing the certificate from scratch because we have just the tool for that.
Use our free certificate maker online that you can use to create and design a certificate in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is pick a certificate template and customize it according to your needs using a user-friendly interface. Once the certificate is ready, you can digitally sign it and send it to your students. Alternatively, you can also print the certificates on parchment paper and send a physical copy to students.
Keep your students engaged
A student’s motivation changes over time and as an instructor, it is imperative that you sustain their interest in your course. Keep in mind that a student that drops out halfway in one of your online courses is highly likely to not take any other courses from you.
Therefore, you need to keep your students engaged to make sure that you sustain their motivation towards your course. Here are some popular strategies that you can apply to engage with your students in an online course:
Conduct polls and surveys asking how you can improve your course or teaching methods. This can provide you with valuable feedback that you can use to improve the quality of courses that you offer. Here is an example from an instructor from Udemy, asking for feedback on their course:
Pose questions from students and give them an opportunity to participate in your sessions or lectures. For achieving this, you can have a live chat option within your course or host a separate Q&A session with your students to interact with them and answer any questions that they have. Here is an example from the same Udemy instructor as above, sharing their Discord channel for live chats and discussion:
Make your course interactive and provide active learning opportunities. Active learning is a type of teaching where you ask the students to contribute to and bring their valuable thoughts on the subject matter. For instance, you can ask students to do their research and share answers to a question, or you can ask students to analyze a case-study and share how it relates to the course’s theoretical knowledge. This helps students apply their knowledge from your lectures to real-world scenarios and improves their learning experience.
Create a discussion forum or common place where students can interact with each other. This can be useful when students want to conduct brainstorming sessions, discuss the course material, or help each other solve problems and challenges related to the subject area. This can be achieved through a Discord channel (as shown in the example above) or by creating a discussion room on your website or course page (most popular services for online courses have this feature available).
Takeaway
With the abundance of online courses and instructors out there, attracting students to your online course can be quite a challenge. However, you can make your course stand out by adding in high-quality course material, keeping your course interactive through discussion rooms and live Q&As, and recognizing students that do well through certificates of achievement.
