Now, you have probably read or heard multiple times that engaging with your audience/students on Turion can improve the overall performance of your courses. But, how exactly do you do it?
There are many primary and secondary studies that have shown that engagement can not only help teachers/course creators to improve their course performance, it can also help students to learn better in many ways.
In this article, we are going to talk about how you can engage with your students, specifically using Turion's Forum feature to boost your course performance.
You can try all of the things that we will list below, or even mix and match to see what fits your situation the best.
Introductory Posts
Start an introductory forum section about your course. Try talking about the course or even get students to start conversations. This is a good warm up for everyone as they slowly get to know your course and community more and more.
If this is done right, you can create a very vibrant community that can become a huge boost to your course. It will instantly make things more appealing as people visit your forum.
A good example is to start a "Introduce Yourself" post and encourage students to follow each other on Turion to build connections. As students share a bond, it can become a source of motivation for them to complete courses or go through learning challenges.
Advice Posts
Advice posts are great for more advanced courses or students. This is somewhat different than regular Q&A posts (which are still viable and great, will discuss after). The difference is that this section answers more experience-based questions, and potentially spark more in-depth discussions. In comparison, Q&A can be used for more simple, entry-level questions.
You can combine advice posts into Q&A posts, but it is still useful to distinct between them, at least for yourself internally. Giving a simple answer to a deep question can be seen as unenthusiastic, and the other way around would be overwhelming when a person receives an answer too complicated for them.
Q&A Posts
As mentioned, a great Q&A section can serve as another way to effectively communicate with your students. Sometimes, people don't feel like chatting on a general or introductory post to get the answers they need. By having a Q&A post, you can help many students get straight to the point of what's bothering them in their learning.
Moreover, you can eventually discover common challenges or some FAQs. It can either help you build a better FAQ list, or improve your content by addressing those common difficulties that multiple students are having.
(Advice posts vs Q&A Posts)
Here's a quick and easy way to differentiate:
Q&A Posts:
Answers could be somewhat direct, and sometimes, spoon feeding is necessary. The goal is to solve a simple question or request, so fast and easy answers are better.
Answers could be somewhat direct, and sometimes, spoon feeding is necessary. The goal is to solve a simple question or request, so fast and easy answers are better.
Advice posts:
Answers can get sophisticated. More thoughtful answers are useful and necessary. Usually, the person asking this would demonstrate a good level of understanding in the topic in their question and the questions can be open-ended.
Answers can get sophisticated. More thoughtful answers are useful and necessary. Usually, the person asking this would demonstrate a good level of understanding in the topic in their question and the questions can be open-ended.
Chat Posts
Now, this is where all the gossiping and chatting happening. Of course, you should avoid turning these into a wild social media comment section war, but you want to make sure it is a place for people to talk about silly or fun things in their lives.
Occasionally, you might even find people's common interests. In other words, understanding your audience more and more, giving you more ways to find new/future students.
It is best to spark conversations and let them flow naturally afterwards. You should always avoid guiding conversations because it could defeat the meaning of "chatting". Definitely avoid selling other products or courses. Not that it is forbidden on Turion, but it is just a bad way to engage with people generally speaking, unless it serves a value to the conversation.
If you've read this far, give it a try and see if it helped with your engagement!