Usually, a student’s engagement within a course is evaluated by their performance, their access to the course content, or the time as well as the effort they devote to the course. Learners generally engage in learning with cognitive, behavioral, social, collaborative, and emotional dimensions. Therefore, skilled educators and teaching professionals need to facilitate social along with collective interaction to safeguard students are emotionally allied within the course.

Research and studies have stated that the foremost block to online student success is the struggle of creating social and emotional connections with and between them. There are a lot of things that are not typically occurring in online classes that usually happen in in-class sessions. For example, natural interaction with others, exchanging smiles, making eye contact and other kinds of positive non-verbal communication.

So, the big question comes…how do you foster emotional connections online? Let’s find out!

Ways Of Creating Emotional Engagement in Online Education

The following suggestions can support teachers to facilitate student engagement in the online learning environment —

1. Humanizing

For building relationships with learners, attempt to “humanize”. Try to create an environment where your students can feel like there is a teacher allotted in their course, not just an automated learning management system (LMS). Try to have actual face-time with your students. Additionally, sharing something about yourself along with other course declarations is also a good practice for humanizing. You may share your hobbies or interests and so on.

2. A Safe Environment

Try to cultivate such an environment in which your learners feel safe about sharing their opinions, asking questions, sharing their feelings and so on. When your students feel knowledgeably “safe,” they feel more motivated to contribute to discussions as well as ask questions. Your training needs to deliver a secure space for making errors and questioning for understanding. Teachers can contribute to the students’ opinions that their contributions have worth, even if they slip the mark.

3. Tempting to Students’ Interests

It is necessary to create your online training session in such a way so that your learners’ interests can also be appreciated. Generally, while communicating with apprentices and providing feedback, educators frequently report appealing to students’ interests to make learning more impactful. Various strategies like measuring apprentices on their interests, encouraging them to share about themselves, learning about student interests all are the ways to connect with learners. It is important to let the students know they are important.

4. Feedback

Indeed, as a relationship-building strategy, feedback is extremely helpful for teachers. Using feedback as the groundwork for building a relationship with students is a great teaching strategy. Formative feedback provides an opportunity to know and understand students well. Moreover, feedback needs to be reliable, explicit, and encouraging.

5. Take Advantage of Technology

You can create more interesting online assignments as they help in improving intrinsic motivation, focus, and interest. Try to create an environment where your learners enjoy learning, when they enjoy themselves, they feel better about being part of the experience.Take benefit of technology to produce emotional connections to class materials. With technology, it can be easier to share media that conjures an emotional response in online classes than in face-to-face classes. Include various evocative images, video clips, narration and other audio tracks into your teaching practice.

6. More Choice

It is important to upsurge learners’ choice to tap into control and value as motivating features. Remember, the more choice you can provide online students, the more they can exercise control over their education. With these options, your students will be able to select tasks that apply to their personal, academic, and career goals. Therefore, try to give options that are valuable to them personally. Wherever possible, give choice in assignment topic, format, and more.

7. Organize the Online Platform Clearly

It is necessary to understand how the materials are organized. Clear and logical organization perceptibly impacts the quality of the online learning experience for your students. It positively influences students’ performance as a well-structured online course certainly impacts a student’s emotional connection to the learning community.

Apart from these above-mentioned ways, consistent communication with your students provides you amply of prospects to appreciate their potentials. Make your students believe that you value them. Let students know that you care about their development because they also wanted educators to be conscious of their development while working online.

E-learning has the power to carry world-class education to any part of the world, whether it’s advancing apprentices’ certifications, teaching them the art of a new skill or helping them pivot their career.The online International Teaching Diploma prepares the 21^st century teaching professionals for this contemporary educational world. Learner engagement directly interprets to online learning accomplishment. The more engaging your teaching session is the more valuable it is to students, and the more successful your career will be.