Motivation

 Student motivation is one of the biggest factors in online environments, with students falling behind, lacking accountability, and often not even participating, motivation is the hardest challenge to tackle. After researching and reflecting on my instructor's practices I concluded the best five ways to motivate students: providing meaningful student feedback and interacting with your classroom is one of the best things you can do for online learning students. Allowing students to virtually interact with you and letting them know that there is an actual person there increases motivation as they aren't just interacting with a screen but with an actual person. The second best way to motivate students is to allow self-monitoring on their learning platforms, keeping track of attendance, computer activity, and course activity enables for students to develop discipline, accountability, and motivation to actually complete the assignments. The third way to motivate students is by encouraging collaboration with other students, assigning group assignments to help foment the sense of a community within an online environment, making students feel more comfortable to post, create, and communicate with peers and the instructor. The fourth way is sprinkling in a variety of different assignments like videos, jamboards, edpuzzles, and a multitude of different assignments that limit repetition. When you create variety, you help the brain stay awake, helping students stay motivated. The fifth and last way to keep students motivated is to make assignments personal and relatable to students' life, by doing this you not only add variety to your assignments but also make students feel like actual human beings, by sharing their experiences, you allow for creativity and the sense of a community to flow.

The application of these tools is all relatively easy, personally, as an online instructor I would host virtual meetings and get to know my students. If a virtual meeting isn't available, I would create a discussion board for students to get to know each other. Through this, when you assign group projects, students are more likely to actually want to work with each other. Additionally, these group projects could also be personal, allowing students to thoroughly get to know each other while also learning the content. As an instructor, I would also make sure to leave meaningful feedback that relates to students, not just generic comments like "good work", but actually discuss what is in their replies or submissions.