Online learning has come a long way, but engagement is still the biggest challenge in making content stick. This is true whether you're teaching third graders or a corporate team. It’s easy for learners to tune out when they’re just watching a video or reading a slide deck.
The answer is in intentional design: adding interactive elements to your course that prompt active participation.
Here’s what works and how to scale it.
When learners are engaged, they retain more, understand better, and feel more connected to the material and to each other. Research backs this up. In a recent study, students in interactive classes were 13 times more likely to speak, showed 16 times more nonverbal engagement, and scored 54% higher on tests than those in passive lecture-style settings.
These are meaningful differences in how well students learn and how likely they are to succeed. Engagement is directly tied to attendance, performance, and persistence. It can reduce dropout rates in K–12 and higher ed, and it accelerates time to proficiency in workplace training.
The more students interact with course material, the more likely they are to understand and apply it.
Here are some of the most effective ways to build interaction into your online courses.
What it is: Group work involves structured peer interaction where learners collaborate on problems, projects, or discussions.
Benefits: Promotes social learning, improves communication skills, and helps learners build confidence by learning from each other.
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What they are: Time-bound activities or games that turn content into a competition or problem-solving task.
Benefits: Boosts motivation, focus, and enjoyment. Encourages participation through gamification.
Examples:
What it is: Opportunities for learners to reflect on what they’ve learned and provide structured feedback to each other.
Benefits: Builds metacognitive skills, deepens comprehension, and cultivates a growth mindset.
Examples:
What they are: These are visual, collaborative spaces embedded into the learning platform where learners can draw, write, and brainstorm together.
Benefits: Encourages participation, supports visual and kinesthetic learners, and provides a canvas for creative problem-solving.
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What they are: Chat, emoji reactions, Q&A, and live hand raises that enable students to respond or ask questions instantly.
Benefits: Creates a sense of presence, increases participation from quieter students, and helps instructors adjust content in real time.
Examples:
What it is: Interactive branching scenarios that simulate real-world decisions with multiple outcomes based on learner choices.
Benefits: Enhances critical thinking, increases retention through experiential learning, and makes abstract concepts concrete.
Examples:
What they are: Polls and quizzes are short interactive assessments or questions posed to learners regularly during the session to reinforce key concepts or check understanding.
Benefits: They break up passive content, re-engage attention, and provide immediate feedback for both students and instructors. They also allow instructors to identify learning gaps early.
Examples:
What it is: Allowing students to submit questions, answers, or ideas anonymously during live or asynchronous discussions.
Benefits: Encourages participation from hesitant learners, surfaces honest feedback, and creates a safe environment for diverse perspectives.
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What it is: Letting learners pause and annotate videos, images, or documents with comments, questions, or highlights.
Benefits: Promotes active viewing and reading, supports better comprehension, and allows asynchronous learners to stay engaged.
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What it is: Giving students the opportunity to create and share their own videos, tutorials, presentations, or questions.
Benefits: Builds ownership, reinforces understanding through teaching, and supports creativity.
Examples:
You don’t need a team of instructional designers to make this work. Here’s how to scale interactive learning without burning out:
Whether you’re teaching live or self-paced, Engageli makes it easy to build engagement into every session:
In the virtual classroom:
In Studio:
Engageli’s multimodal platform integrates live and asynchronous learning under one system - making interactive learning scalable, flexible, and effective.
Want to see how easy it can be to create active, effective learning experiences? Explore Engageli Studio to build interactive on-demand courses, or book a demo of Engageli’s Virtual Classroom to bring engagement to your live sessions.