Anyone working with digital products and education knows that keeping students engaged is a challenge.
The lack of in-person interaction and everyday distractions cause many people to drop out of a course.
Humans make an average of 35,000 decisions per day, and with so much information competing for attention, if your course isn’t relevant, students will abandon it—even if they’ve already paid for it.
To prevent this, in this article, you’ll discover 6 secrets to keeping students engaged from start to finish, increasing course completion rates and overall satisfaction.
Why Is Student Engagement Important for a Course’s Success?
To understand its importance, we need to consider the problems caused by low engagement.
A course with low engagement also has a low completion rate, leading to consequences such as:
- Refund requests;
- Difficulty in generating testimonials;
- Negative impact on reputation;
- Decreased student retention.
High engagement ensures that students stay interested and motivated to continue learning with you.
By consuming your content, students will apply what they learn, and if their experience is positive, they will recommend it to others.
To increase student engagement, let’s explore 6 easy-to-apply strategies.
6 Secrets to Maintaining High Student Engagement in Online Courses
1. Organize Your Course into Modules
If your course is too long, placing all the videos in a single module can be overwhelming for students who expected a more structured and organized approach.
Breaking your course into modules makes learning easier, as it helps students track their progress in small steps.
Each module should cover a specific topic, creating a sense of accomplishment every time a student completes a section.
2. Provide Supporting Materials and Practical Exercises
Platforms like Alura have long been integrating video lessons with quizzes and additional learning materials.
Offering various formats to present content helps students retain information better.
Additionally, quizzes provide psychological rewards, as students feel motivated when they get correct answers and reinforce their learning.
Some types of supporting materials that course creators can offer to increase student engagement include:
- Ebooks
- Mind maps
- Quizzes
- Notion templates
- Spreadsheets
- Infographics
3. Offer Bonus Content with Conditions
Surprising students with bonus lessons is an excellent way to keep them interested throughout the course.
However, these bonuses should be given strategically, such as after a student has completed 50% of the course.
This strategy should only be used for additional content. Holding back core lessons that were promised at the start of the course could frustrate students, as they paid for full access to the material.
4. Use Hooks to Maintain Curiosity
The most successful TV series use a technique called "cliffhanger", a storytelling strategy that ends an episode at the highest point of tension, leaving the resolution for the next episode. If you’re a Breaking Bad fan, you’ll understand.
Just like in TV series, you should connect the beginning of each lesson with the end of the previous one, keeping students eager to continue watching.
To apply this technique, simply end a lesson by introducing the next topic with a closing sentence, such as:
"In the next lesson, you’ll discover how this technique can double your results."
5. Personalize the Learning Journey with Artificial Intelligence
With artificial intelligence, you can adapt the learning experience to each student’s individual needs, providing real-time support and personalized responses.
With this in mind, Panda Video has created PandaAssist AI, a virtual assistant that learns from your hosted videos.
By reading lesson transcriptions, it absorbs the context and becomes useful in answering student questions—just like ChatGPT.
Students can access PandaAssist AI directly from the video player, without needing any involvement from your IT team.
6. Use Emails and Strategic Notifications
Maintaining communication with students outside the platform is essential to reinforce their commitment to the course.
Well-planned emails help remind students to continue studying and reinforce the importance of completing the course.
For this reason, create an email flow that supports different learning goals, such as:
- Encouraging students to watch the first lesson;
- Motivating them to continue modules;
- Following up after they complete the course.
In the final follow-up email, you can invite students to purchase an upsell for a high-ticket product.
Continue Improving the Student Journey
Student engagement is not something you achieve once and forget.
Behavior changes, and new students join the course, making it necessary to track performance metrics.
Regularly review course completion rates, email open rates, and most importantly, student feedback.
By providing a high-quality learning experience, you strengthen your course’s reputation and increase the chances of attracting new students, creating a positive growth cycle and reducing paid traffic costs.
If you want to enhance this experience even further, try Panda Video for free and see how professional video hosting can make a difference in your digital product.
