Have a look through the following eight strategies to motivate and engage your students. Have you tried them already? Are there some new ideas?
Examples of strategies for motivating and engaging your students
Make at least the first activity a novel or fun process to generate interest. For example, simulations and games generate situational interest.
Relate activities and tasks to the real world to generate personal interest. Explain to students the potential value of activities and tasks, and the benefits of completing them successfully.
Ask yourself: How does the course support interaction between students - content, students - peers and students - teachers? Does the course offer active learning face-to-face and online?
4. Use online features in Canvas to support Māori and non-Māori students with whanaungatanga, formative feedback, interaction and flexible learning.
Modelling (either live or videoed) is an effective way to show competent performance. e.g. students from higher years, and/or trained actors, to enhance students' self-efficacy.
Describe competent performance you expect in a task and relate this performance to relevant goals, e.g. goals in real-world situations. Effective teachers explain their expectations about students' achievement in relation to assessment tasks. Construct a marking rubric to share with students or communicate expectations about the quality of future work explicitly in your feedback.
Design and set practice tasks for students to have opportunities to be successful at these tasks, to satisfy their need to feel effective and enhance their expectation of success for similar tasks, and to build their self-efficacy. An easy way to do this is to set a practice test in Canvas which students can attempt as many times as they wish.
Set aside time in the course for students to engage collaboratively in activities and tasks. This could be virtual or in your lectures where they work together on solving problems or answering a question.