How Giving Active Feedback Delivers 10X More Impact in an Online Course

Are you delivering to the best of your capability, and still only a few students are excelling? Do you want your each student to excel?

Measuring progress can help achieve goals better.
Measuring progress can help achieve goals better. 

Are you delivering to the best of your capability, and still only a few students are excelling in your online class? Do you want that each student who signs up for the course to take home a tangible benefit from it?

Our mantra is simple. Set a goal, measure the progress, and see their misses. You and the student will know exactly what needs to be done to achieve the learning objective. Also, in the end, you get a well-documented playbook for success!

Image credits: Endodontic Practice
Image credits: Endodontic Practice

Why You Should Do It?

Tracking a student’s (or client’s) progress can be the most obvious but also underrated and overlooked aspect of any learning model. Until the time your students don’t see that they are making progress, your course isn’t a successful one. Therefore, creators and educators must ensure to dedicate time to activities that measure the individual and collective progress of their classroom.

This becomes even more important for cohort-based courses where the classes are structured based on sub-goals. Every class, the cohort aims at achieving one or two sub-goals, and progress with that can be a major booster for students as well as instructors. Also, clients invest their time and money in cohort-based courses and they would like to see tangible results with time.

Moreover, as discussed by Victoria Stanishevskaya,

“Tracking student progress plays a significant role both for teachers and learners. When learners see their growth, they better understand how their efforts relate to bigger goals.”

So, tracking progress benefits both the students and the educators, and definitely must not be overlooked.

Image credits: Weekdone Blog
Image credits: Weekdone Blog

So How To Track Progress?

Given below are a few ways you can employ to track your students’ progress throughout the cohort-based course.

  • Conduct regular surveys and feedbacks

According to Data Analytics Instructor Ben Collins, conducting surveys provides “evidence of transformation.” He suggests conducting one pre-program and one post-program survey. However, some courses also take feedback at the end of each session.

The feedback form can consist of two types of questions.

The first one is asking the student for their overall experience- “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you?” “Would you recommend our course to your friends and acquaintances?” etc.

The second type of questions are those that require them to introspect- “Were you able to hold your Yoga posture for at least 3 minutes today?” “Were you able to write a creative piece within 20 minutes?” etc.

Image credits: Bonusly Blog
Image credits: Bonusly Blog
  • Use some tools as markers of your progress

Shivali Chatterjee, a Yoga instructor, and creator with SocialBoat tells us about using certain props for measuring the progress of her clients. In addition to keeping individual progress records of all clients, she asks them to try and touch chairs, ropes, and other such things while holding their poses, and eventually as the classes progress, they are perfectly comfortable with doing that.

This way her clients can see their progress for themselves without actually having to look at any data or analysis.

Image credits: Deccan Herald
Image credits: Deccan Herald
  • Organize competitions, quiz, and other fun activities

Another fun way to trace your students' progress and also raise their spirits and boost their morale is by organizing energizing competitions. These can be of different kinds depending upon the nature of the topic of your class.

For example, fitness trainer and nutritionist Hitesh Dhawan, who manages a big audience from different countries, keeps his audience engaged by organizing various online fitness competitions, like so and so number of push-ups, squats, etc.

For classes that are more theoretical, quiz competitions can be organized to test the students’ knowledge.

These can also be done in teams so that they help in community bonding and forming long-term connections.

Image credits: New York Post
Image credits: New York Post
  • Develop a buddy system

Many online courses like Led By Foundation’s Accelerator Program assign partners to students from the cohort itself. Instead of partners, it can also be a group of three people or so, but preferably a small group. Now, these assigned group-mates are required to keep updating each other of their progress and completion of assigned tasks. They also keep a check on each other's attendance.

This increases the accountability of the students and they become more participative. Hence, they can track their progress personally without any direct involvement from the course instructors.

Image credits: USA Today
Image credits: USA Today
  • Use the first 5 minutes of the class for an update from students

When the students log in to the class, you can dedicate the first five minutes or so to students telling their cohort members about what they have learned since the last class, in a couple of lines. This way they can be motivated to perform better and also know how they have improved. A simple method, if made a practice, can make a lot of difference.

Image credits: The College of Saint Rose
Image credits: The College of Saint Rose
  • Keep presentations and demo days

On completion of the course, one day can be set as a demo day where students can present on an assigned topic what they have learned throughout the course. This can be done in the presence of all students, very similar to presentations in schools and colleges. Students and instructors can both measure how successful the course has been.

Now you know how tracking student progress can upgrade your course and make it one of the successful ones in the market. You also have ways you can do that. So what are you waiting for? Build your online course now!

Here are some other insights from SocialBoat that might help you.