To make an online school successful, you have to get to know the students very well. Any content that you want to create for an audience requires a thorough understanding of those who will access it. Providing them with a personal learning experience is the best way that you can make the online lessons as memorable so you can increase retention rate.
Of course, it is easy to say that you need to get to know the students that will be accessing the online course. Doing it is a different thing. You have to be careful not to over-generalize what the learners will need. At the same time, you should avoid complicating things by being too specific. Find the right balance so you can create a course that will give online school students the best learning experience.
To simplify things, here are three important questions that you need to ask.
What is the common learning foundation?
Start by understanding their pre-learning conditions. The background of the learners is an important piece of information that will help you create the best course for the online school. It will allow you to understand the take-off point of the learners when it comes to the lesson. There are some courses that require students to have a specific knowledge foundation. That way, the online course can cut to the chase and proceed to the meat of the lesson. There are many things that you need to find out. While an online school usually teaches everything about a particular subject or niche, the courses do not contain everything. The lessons are usually best cut up into bite-sized courses so retention will be maximized. Here are a couple of them:
- What are the existing skills that they have? This will help you figure out if there are gaps that you need to fill in the learning process. If the online school is for customer service training, you may want to see if the students know the common phone call courtesy, etc. This will give you an idea about the courses that you will offer.
- Do they have a past learning experience? Apart from the skills, you also want to know their knowledge of the lesson that will be given. In the same way as the skills, you will be able to identify if there are gaps that you need to fill so the students can go through the lesson more efficiently.
- Are they ready to use elearning as a means to study? An online school is different from traditional learning. The student has to have the capabilities to access it and to learn from it effectively. Some students may have had a bad experience with this method of learning and that could hinder them from learning what they should from this online course.
What is the expected learning experience?
Once you have figured out their background, you can now proceed to their expectations during the learning process. The background gave you an idea about the needed content in the course. The next piece of information that you will need will involve how the content will be delivered. You need to ask yourself these questions:
- What are their technical capabilities? An online school is accessed through the Internet and requires a computer. Some courses are best accessed through a mobile phone. You need to make sure that the format of your course can be accessed by the students.
- How do they prefer to learn? There are different ways of learning and you want to be able to understand what these are for your students. You do not have to satisfy their individual learning preferences as long as you can create a platform that will make the course interesting enough for them to fully commit.
- What will make them participate in the course? Another thing that you need to consider are the activities that will get them to participate. This is actually easy because most of us right now are actively participating online. You just have to understand how you will specifically make them participate. There are programs, sites, and platforms that will cater to a specific age group for instance. You can use this to help facilitate the learning process effectively.
- What are the circumstances surrounding the learning? Another question that you need to ask involves the circumstances that could affect the learning experience of the student. The online school can be accessed anywhere and you may want to consider how the students are most likely to learn.
What is the intention for the acquired knowledge?
Finally, you want to know the intention of the learners in going through the online learning. What do they want to get out of the online school? How do they want to use it? This is important because you want to meet the goals and objectives of the learners when they access your course. Do they intend to use in their daily lives? Or do they want to use it at work? Is it intended to take them to the next level of learning? Or is it something that they can immediately implement in their life? These questions will allow you to deliver the content of the lesson in a manner that best fits the student profile. Bottom line is, you need to understand the plans of the student after the lesson.
Creating courses for an online school will become less complicated if you just get to know the students who will be learning in it. As the learning experience becomes more relevant and valuable, the more it will encourage other students to pursue their learning in this platform.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles for FreeDigitalPhotos.net