Tips for Building Student Engagement Courses in 2025

Improve Lessons with Early Engagement Strategies

If you are a teacher, you probably already know the basic principles of creating effective courses in online learning platforms. But if you’re aiming for improved student engagement, a little creativity goes a long way. To help you deliver more immersive learning experiences and keep your audience captivated, we’ve put together 5 tips for creating unusual and lesser-known lessons. They are easy to use and improve as you develop your educational programs.

5 Tips for Creating High Engagement Courses

1. Create a “Series” of Learning about Cliffhangers

Have you ever watched an episode of a great TV show that ended on a cliffhanger that left you on the edge of your seat wondering what was coming in the next few days? You can do the same with your studies.

Break up your course content into episodes with suspenseful endings to keep students curious and eager to come back for more. Here are some ways you can do this:

• Complete the lesson chapter with an unanswered question. Ask a thought-provoking question or show a big idea that students will explore in the next chapter or module. For example, “What happens if a key stakeholder disagrees with your proposal? Find out in the next lesson.”
• Focus on future benefits or details. Let your students know what they’ll get—be sure to tie it to their big-picture goals. For example, “In the next chapter, you’ll find out how to win a typical customer’s goal with one simple strategy—don’t miss it!”
• Introduce a cliffhanger situation. Conclude with a puzzle or incomplete story that leaves students wanting to solve. For example, “Your team just discovered a major bug in the project—what are you going to do next?”

The best way to combine cliffhangers in creating lessons is to use branching scenarios. In iSpring Suite, a PowerPoint-based authoring tool for teachers, you can create learning journeys with branch routes across all learning content. They challenge the user to make decisions and move forward based on the consequences of the decisions they make.

Branching out with cliffhangers is not only good for keeping students coming back for more information but also helps them practice skills in a gamified environment. This allows them to apply these skills in real life situations and situations.

2. Add Social Media Style Videos

Inspired by the eye-catching style of social media, short, dynamic videos engage readers the same way they are drawn to Instagram Reels or TikToks. In other words, micro-videos mimic the dopamine-driven engagement that readers experience by scrolling through social media.

You don’t have to be a social media influencer to produce great short video content. In fact, you can turn your existing video courses into TikTok-like content in just a few steps:

• Break up your existing video lessons into powerful, witty, or engaging snippets, keeping each segment under 60 seconds.
• Equip yourself with jump-cut, visual effects, and dynamic transitions to make videos visually appealing.
• Choose upbeat, funky tracks or trending sounds to add energy.
• Add captions to improve accessibility.
• Make sure your videos are crisp, easy to watch on small screens, and maintain high quality when compressed for mobile devices.

Pro tip: Look for social media trends like new memes or background music tracks and incorporate them into your videos to make your learning content feel current and relevant.

3. Use Surprise Mechanics

Nothing keeps students from getting bored better than random twists and pop-ups in your course content. This can be almost anything:

• Small prizes
• Bonus content
• “Easter Eggs”
• Celebrations of progress, etc.

These surprises play a huge role in overall learning and allow students to feel invested and motivated. At the same time, you as the teacher get to reinforce important concepts in a fun, engaging way while tracking the student’s progress through their interactions with these unexpected things.

You can strategically place these surprises throughout the lesson, such as at the beginning of a module to grab attention, in the middle of a lesson to re-engage students, at key steps to reward progress, or at the end of a lesson for a long break. the idea.

So, the next time you create a course, consider adding hidden slides or unexpected pop-up questions to your content and see how these surprises increase student engagement and retention.

4. Crowdsource Content From Your Readers

This approach is inspired by user-generated content (UGC), a widely used tactic in social media marketing. In effect, you can make students co-creators: invite them to share their insights, create mini-lessons, or co-edit content.

Here’s how to put this strategy together:

• Encourage students to create short lessons on a specific topic they are knowledgeable about.
• Use surveys, polls, or opinion boards where students can suggest improvements, additional topics, or creative approaches to your existing courses.
• Use discussion boards or live webinars to gather students’ ideas on a topic, and then integrate their ideas into additional course resources.

Crowdsourcing content and ideas from students will give you a fresh perspective on how they approach a topic, allowing you to create more relevant and impactful learning courses. Besides, they will gain valuable knowledge in converting their knowledge into teaching content. This contributes to a collaborative learning environment, which deepens student engagement and gives students a sense of choice in the educational process.

Pro tip: You don’t need to buy a lot of seats in an authoring tool to engage your students in the experience of creating a collaborative lesson. Tools like iSpring Suite offer a free trial period, so you can run a group project at no extra cost, helping students create effective educational content from scratch.

5. Enter FOMO

FOMO stands for “fear of missing out,” which is a psychological trigger that compels people to act quickly to avoid missing out on unique opportunities or experiences. You can use it in the context of creating courses by providing exclusive content or educational information that your students won’t want to miss.

To use FOMO, you can introduce:

• Time-sensitive challenges or questions.
• Limited access to resources to complete assignments.
• Early-bird content for students who start courses within a certain period, etc.

These FOMO-based course boosters increase urgency and engagement, encouraging students to put in more effort for a reward. In addition, they create a sense of uniqueness and achievement, which improves student satisfaction.

The Last Word

Sometimes, all it takes to spark student engagement and increase motivation is an extra task or reward your audience didn’t expect. This is exactly what the 5 tricks on the list can help you achieve. And the best part? You don’t have to reinvent your learning content—just add something new or improve existing materials with the tips above.

So, go ahead and try these strategies to engage students in your future or current courses. And if you need some inspiration, why not schedule an iSpring Suite demo? An iSpring course design expert will walk you through the tool’s capabilities, show you samples of real courses created by our users, and help you bring your educational content ideas to life quickly and easily.