Everybody has own ways to be virtually ENGAGED

Using different ways to recruit learners interest, makes learning accessible and it responds to inter- and intra-individual differences amongst learners. During e-learning sessions, recruiting interest in different ways is more vital because recognising level of interest and adapting own teaching to increase interest is more difficult.

Optimize individual choice and autonomy. Autonomy is not a possibility to choose the learning object but to offer choices in how that object is reached. Allowing students to participate in the design of activities and academic goals helps to increase motivation and engagement.

• challenge

• rewards

• context for skills

• visual elements

• order of tasks

• timing

Providing learners several ways and tools to achieve goals instead of forging use of one tool, helps students to design their e-learning experience to fit their specific needs.

Optimize relevance, value and authenticity. Individuals are interested in information and activities that have relevance and value for their goals. Teachers have to highlight the utility and relevance of learning and use authentic and meaningful activities and sources of information that provide options for different learners. Connect information and activities to learners’ own context.

• culturally and socially relevant and responsive

• personalized and contextualized

• appropriate for different groups (age, abilities, racial, cultural, ethnic, gender)

Highlight use of imagination to solve relevant problems and foster personal responses, evaluation and self-reflection.

Knowing students' background via e-learning settings can happen through anonymous form or comment boards. Timing that before the first meeting helps targeting learning situations.

Minimize threats and distractions. Most important thing to do is create a safe space for learners. Concentration to the learning process demands a safe virtual space, fulfill the learner's basic needs and no need to avoid negative experiences. Involve all participants and vary the necessary levels:

• make predictable activities and routine

• presence of noise and visual stimulations

• timing of working

• demands required to performance

In virtual environments safe space is best created via starting instructions and accessible guidelines. Highlight access to rules, timing and demands via accessible instructional guides.

Learning requires sustained attention and effort, but learners differ in initial motivation and self-regulation skills. External environment must be built in a way that it equalizes options for all learners.

Heighten salience of goals and objectives. Some learners need support to remember the goal and rewards of reaching it. Displaying goals in multiple ways, visualizing it and encouraging dividing long-term goals to short-term.

Pinning goals visible and making clear places to create own goals in visible helps learners to remember goals. It is a good way to start e-learning events and tasks showing goals and creating space to check and update your own goals.

Vary demands and resources to optimize challenges. Challenge is a primary need of learning but different challenges fit for different learners’ and to respond these different kinds of resources are needed. Offering differenties to the degree of difficulty, complexity and freedom within which activities can be completed. Alternatives in the permissible tools and scaffolds are vital for different learners. Creating different paths and alternatives to the challenge level can happen via different task types or adaptive e-material.

Foster collaboration and community. Communicating and collaborating effectively is a common goal for all learners, that can be practised through peer-mentoring and flexible working groups. It is always important to learn about working with others through doing it in different ways.

• Create cooperative learning groups and visualize their goals, expectations and roles.

• Focus on positive behavior support

• Guide learners in when and how to ask help

In e-learning environments it is possible to create several ways to communicate with other students but encouraging the use of other non-formal communication channels helps students to find their own accessible ways to communicate.

Increase mastery-oriented feedback. Most relevant aspects of engagement building and mastery-oriented feedback are relevance, constructive, accessible, consequential and timely. Mastery-oriented feedback emphasizes the role of effort and practice.

• Encourage perseverance

• Help to develop efficacy and self-awareness

• Provide informative and substantive feedback

Proper combination of automatically-built, teacher-oriented and peer-oriented feedback could be built with effective use of digital learning environment tools and well designed structure of learning situations. Make sure that learners have access to all previous feedback, in the best situation they constitute a student's own feedback-portfolio.

Ability to self-regulate is a very important aspect of human development. Some students learn these skills autonomously but some need support to develop them.

Promote expectations and beliefs that optimize motivation. What motivates me is an important aspect of self-regulation skills development. To reach this goal, important things are realistically setted goals and beliefs that these goals are possible to reach. Important things to help students stay motivated are:

• visible reminders to self-regulatory goals and models for goals that take into account strengths and weaknesses.

• provide activities that encourages self-reflection and identification of personal goals

• possibility to see peers that success in tasks or learning new skills

In a digital environment allowing students to see other progress can be created by collaboration platforms or common strength and weakness compactions. Remember to give feedback about the student's goals.

Facilitate personal coping skills and strategies. Good strategy for managing and directing their emotional responses to external or internal events. To help facilitate coping skills, use real life situations to demonstrate coping skills and provide models and feedback for:

• managing frustration

• avoiding thought of natural aptitude

• seeking external emotional support and developing internal controls and coping skills

When actions happen in a digital environment, technology can bring challenges for teachers too, making these things visible and giving words to challenges and ways to overcome them, can be the most effective lesson of the day.

Develop self-assessment and reflection. Creating better capacity for self-regulation, learning to monitor emotions and reactions, is a vital skill. Ability to recognize one's own progress is one of the key factors of maintaining motivation. Multiple models and scaffolds of different self-assessment techniques are needed, offering ways to collect data of behaviour changes.

Offer checkpoints and moments to evaluate your own progress can happen via digital forms or interactive media in a digital environment.