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Summary: If your main problem is to keep your students attention during your online live sessions, you’re not alone. Most online instructors struggle in keeping their students engaged. Here are the 9 leading student engagement platforms to help you deal with it.
Increasing student engagement is a challenge that’s not fading away either in traditional classroom settings or in online learning. Too many distractions and challenges take away students' focus and motivation. Yet, it’s hard to solve this alone as an online instructor who’s facilitating a large group of students.
That’s the reason why hundreds of tools, apps, and platforms are unfolding in the market, to help online instructors in keeping their students engaged. But as an online instructor, it’s tough to choose the best student engagement platform that fits your needs. So let me show you the leading platforms in the market to save you time in finding the best ones.
Before that, let me walk you through the benefits of student engagement platforms and strategies that you can use to increase learner engagement.
What are Student Engagement Platforms?
Student engagement platforms are a collection of tools to help online instructors, trainers, and course creators to capture students' inputs and track their performance with the given data.
Through these platforms, online instructors can automate other tasks and focus on developing personalized learning experiences for their students. An example of this is—instead of manually creating a boring quiz, you can gamify it and make it fun using Kahoot! or Quizizz in just minutes!
Student Engagement Strategies
1. Gamification
Gamifying your course, workshops, or live sessions can boost student engagement. This is absolutely a game changer in making your students highly engaged. There are tons of tools to help you gamify your lessons which I stated below.
2. Stories and Metaphors.
Using stories and metaphors in your lessons can increase student retention and make learning interesting. Humans are wired to learn from stories because it depicts emotions and they are more relatable than just mere facts. So if you can tell stories than just stating facts, the better.
3. Group work.
Integrate group work and break out sessions to increase engagement. There are many advantages of group work such as creating camaraderie, becoming a team player, and improving listening skills among students.
4. Reflection.
Self-reflection and team reflection can enhance engagement and knowledge retention. Choose a platform like Teachfloor that allows you to facilitate reflections among your students through peer review and instructor review features.
9 Leading Student Engagement Platforms (with Features & Pricing)
Teachfloor
Teachfloor is an all-in-one learning platform that allows interactive lessons through peer review and instructor review features. Not only that, Teachfloor is designed for a collaborative learning experience. It has multiple integrations and allows online instructors to create their hybrid courses in just minutes.
It’s the best and the leading student engagement platform that focuses on the learner's experience. Give it a shot and try our notable features for a 15-day free trial.
Top Features
✅ Peer review that allows students to collaborate and reflect with peers
✅ Instructor review where online instructors can create student tasks in minutes
✅ On-demand video to make lessons more engaging
✅ Track student's progress with intensive insights
✅ Built-in community space for asynchronous learning
✅ Zapier, Zoom & other app integrations
✅ Customer priority support & live demo
✅ Helpful resources on eLearning
✅ Affordable Pro plan
Pricing
- Pro Plan - $59/month with unlimited students, unlimited courses, unlimited file storage, and lets you add up to 4 instructors.
- Business Plan - $299/month. This is perfect for scaled online academies running more than 10 cohorts every year. You can add up to 15 instructors with the same unlimited features in the Pro plan.
- Enterprise Plan - Feel free to talk to the founders of Teachfloor to give you a customized quotation. This is perfect for middle to large enterprises with several educational products, launching bunches of courses or training programs in a year.
Orah
Orah is a collection of several specialized products such as an easy-to-use dashboard, attendance tracking, emergency management, and well-being solutions. Its comprehensive tracking system allows online instructors to engage students with automation which makes it one of the leading student engagement platforms of 2023.
Top Features
✅ Student attendance and progress tracking
✅ Organize collaborative activities with speed and precision
✅ Automatic emergency communications to reduce risk
✅ 30-minute mood check to monitor student well-being
Pricing: The standard plan is free, however, there is also a professional plan where pricing depends on the region and you may need to contact support to quote a price.
Google Workspace for Education
Google Workspace for Education is a collaborative suite that includes Google Classroom, Meet, Jamboard, and Gmail. If you don’t want to learn another tool other than Google, then it's best to use Google for Education. Millions of users trusted this brand which makes it one of the leading student engagement platforms on the internet.
Top Features
✅ Collaboration and communication tools
✅ Security center and data loss prevention
✅ Premium engagement features, and many more!
Pricing: Fees are available for quotation
Kaltura
Transform your old-fashioned live lecture into an interactive video learning experience. Kaltura is the leading student engagement platform when it comes to engaging learners through videos and other media services.
It is widely used across different industries, but for online courses, you can use it in virtual events, webinars, training platforms, town halls, video portals, video messaging, and even online meetings.
Top Features
✅ Video content management for creation, transcoding, publishing, etc
✅ Virtual event platform and online community portal
✅ Cloud TV platform
✅ Virtual classrooms, LMS video, campus portal, etc
Pricing: Pricing depends on the features you need. Some have free trials and for some, you may need to get a quotation. An example of this is—if you plan to host a webinar with Kaltura, you can get a 14-day free trial and pay a subscription of $150/month.
Kahoot!
Kahoot! is the most popular game-based student-centered learning platform. Just recently, Kahoot! was named one of Fast Company’s “Brands That Matter” in 2022 by making it learning fun and highly engaging! It becomes the leading student engagement platform for gamification.
Top Features
✅ Allows you to create games, quizzes, & puzzles
✅ Engage your class with interactive lessons
✅ Track class progress for formative assessment
✅ Request students’ feedback via polls, surveys
✅ Available for schools, work, personal, etc
Pricing:
- Free plans available
- Kahoot! Premium+ - $9/teacher/month
- Kahoot! EDU - $12/teacher/month
Quizizz
Quizizz turns boring quizzes, and assessments into interactive ones. You can create, customize, engage and track data with real-time insights. It works for teachers, schools, and corporate trainers.
Top Features
✅ Interactive quizzes, assessments
✅ Real-time insights to track student progress
✅ Shared library and LMS integration
Pricing: Free plan for teachers! A customizable plan for schools and districts
Nearpod
Nearpod is a cloud-based learning management software that believes teaching is the most important job in the world! That’s why they help teachers and online instructors to make teaching better & easier through their interactive tools, resources, and content—in one place.
Top Features
✅ Interactive lessons through simulations, quizzes, and VR activities
✅ Activity dashboard where teachers can upload slides, PDFs, videos, etc
✅ Real-time insights to track student’s performance
✅ Powerful integrations with other platforms such as Blackboard, Remind, Microsoft teams, etc
Pricing: Individual teachers can get their plans:
- Free plan with 100MB storage, 40 students per lesson, and other features & functionalities
- Gold plan - $159/year, with 1GB storage, 75 students, and other features
- Platinum - $397/year for larger class with 5GB storage, 90 students, and other features
There is also a premium plan for schools and institutions where you can get a quote straightly from Nearpod.
Zensimu
Zensimu is perfect for corporate training and online courses that tackle supply chain management, lean manufacturing, and continuous improvement understanding. They gamify what’s happening in reality so students can comprehend better and apply their learnings in the real job.
Top Features
✅ Supply chain simulation
✅ Factory simulation teaching key lean principles and tools
✅ Practical and fun learning experience
Pricing: Starts at $94 with 1-month access. Pricing depends on the number of participants, instructors, and what games to play.
Remind
Remind is an easy-to-use connector platform that supports student success without you doing most of the tasks. The core functionality of Remind is its two-way communication between instructors and students (or parents) to track and maintain the learning progress of students. Not only that, they also have 1-on-1 tutoring for students to enhance support and create meaningful engagement.
Top Features
✅ Free two-way messaging
✅ 1-on-1 tutoring sessions for students
✅ Communication hub for a large group
Pricing: The chat feature is free and it includes 2-way text messaging and language translation. For large groups, the hub feature is available for a quotation.
Student engagement platforms have their unique abilities to keep your students engaged
There are many ways on how to keep your students engaged as well as tools to help you. These leading student engagement platforms have their unique abilities to make lessons interactive and collaborative. It’s a matter of knowing what features you need depending on your topic, course design, and materials. Test out some platforms on this list and discover how they can help you to increase student engagement.
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