Teachers attempt to do the same, by providing students with significant feedback that develops their thinking and facilitates the learning’s path. However, in an online classroom, feedback does even more as it plays a crucial role in student engagement and motivation.
My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better. – Steve Jobs.
First, teachers need to set intellectually challenging, but achievable, learning experiences - whether that's through material creation, or classroom management, lesson planning, etc; then, provide appropriate assessment of progress of the learning outcomes.
Of course, instructors can set up lots of different games and/or funny exercises to keep students engaged at certain junctures in the lesson; but what really reveals to be a continuing motivator factor in the long term is establishing goals and giving feedback on their success.
What teachers and students need is something which shows learners’ realistic development pathways – where they are, where they're supposed to be and how they're going to get there - and allows for feedback on those particular pathways - might they be on a piece of paper or on a platform.
In the online environment especially, this plays a key role in student engagement and motivation. Frequently learners feel left behind and perceive the virtual distance as a real barrier; on the other hand, teachers struggle to create close relationships with students that they might have never met face-to-face. However, clear goals and constructive feedback given along the way create an inclusive environment where students feel encouraged and involved.
What’s more, well-defined communication and clear corrections are highlighted when considering one of the five criteria established by the National Board of Teaching Standards to motivate learners - “Develop meaningful and respectful relationships with your students.”
With the aim to help teachers trigger students’ motivation and engagement in the online language environment, we at Edugo.AI have developed our advanced system to ease students-teachers communication and keep track of each student’s progress.
In the environment of the online classroom, teachers can set common objectives and share in advance the curriculum with students. Each lesson, complete with interactive exercises around the skills students need to master in learning a new language (created in just minutes, through simple language content upload – while letting our AI-powered system handle all the rest), can be completed by students at their own pace. The system provides immediate feedback on their performance, while notifying the teacher of the lesson’s completion.
The instructor monitors the progress of the whole group of students, keeping track of the overall results updated in real time – thus measuring their engagement and adjusting the lesson plan in case learners are not performing according to the standards. Moreover, the teacher has access to each single student’s results, and not only monitors the wrong and right answers automatically signed by the system, but also marks homework assigned, by giving comments and grades.
This way, teaching jobs become simplified - now instructors can now fully focus on lesson content and clear communication, and engage students with the new online dynamics effortlessly.
