Ideas and activities for encouraging interaction
Description
As a facilitator, you need to keep your online language learning course or activity from becoming stagnant from a lack of interaction. Providing an interactive and engaging environment will attend to learners’ motivation, and it will enable community to develop in the online space. An interactive and engaging environment includes ample opportunities for learners to interact with their classmates, facilitator, and course content. Ideally, learners will also feel a strong desire to interact, as the benefits of these opportunities for interaction become apparent and obvious.
An indicator that your online space is rich with the prospect of learner engagement is that you will start to notice learner presence emerging from the course activity. Learners will start following your lead and the lead of others in expressing themselves – their opinions, their reasons for learning, their frustrations, and their successes – in the online space. Learners will actively begin to post questions not only to the facilitator, but to the group as a whole. You will get a sense that learners are starting to realize that their presence is a major component of the learning that happens in the online space.
This resource is a description of ways to encourage interactivity in online language learning. It includes information about the importance of socialization and learner presence for language learners.