Would You Eat if You Weren´t Hungry?
And Why Would I Learn if Not Interested?

We all teachers know that the most important factor to learn anything is to be interested in it. You will hardly learn anything if you don’t want to know and this is what we denominate motivation. There are things you want to forget about and others that impressed you and will remember forever. So, one of our most important jobs is to motivate our students, insufflate on them the desire to learn about something and keep it.

Obviously, in order to do that efficiently, the teacher must be the first thoroughly motivated to be able to pass on their enthusiasm to students. An educator who is not passionate about their subject will never excel in sowing knowledge and determination to learn in their students’ brains.

If learners are motivated, they will pay attention to the lesson, but involuntary distractions are sometimes unavoidable. In a classroom situation, the teacher can notice and perhaps with a simple gesture bring a learner back from dreamland. But in a virtual situation that is quite unlikely and the possibilities for the students to get mentally (and sometimes physically) disconnected, are much greater.

Nevertheless, the strategies to capture the students’ attention are pretty much the same in face to face as in virtual lessons. The great difference can be in the way to apply them.

1. In both cases the teacher should present, and explain, if necessary, the objectives of the course in general and of the lesson in particular. They should know where you are leading them and what they are supposed to reach.
2. Now it is considered that students should be the owners of their learning, that they should be pretty autonomous learners, for which they must exercise responsibility. In order to get this idea across, you need to keep reminding them. Allow students to monitor their own progress. Besides, and this is difficult to digest for us, it is the individual student who marks their rhythm of assimilation. Not everybody learns at the same speed.
3. Foster continuous students’ participation. Do different activities: oral, written, in video, individual, in groups, infographics, interactive videos, etc. Create an open and accessible environment for the students.
4. Another important point in both cases is to provide recognition and feedback to students’ interventions and contributions, so they can learn from their rights and wrongs. It is also important that feedback on papers or projects be prompt, or they will lose interest.
5. Language teachers had already stood out in schools for being innovative (and eventually, for the other teachers, noisy). Technology offers us many more ways to exercise this attribute. There is even a term that has to do with this: “gamification.” Well, we were doing game teaching in face to face classes: and now we have other ways of doing it. And if you think that games are only for kids, you are in for a big surprise. The essential point is that they either learn new things or reinforce what they have been exposed to and not only have fun.
6. Use different methodologies, remember that not all people learn in the same manner. Vary, be creative. Play on the curiosity of your learners, use forums, attention-grabbing questions for them to find the answers.
7. As you are close and approachable to your students face to face, try to achieve closeness on line, which is somewhat more taxing for them and for you. Do embolden them to ask questions and do not leave any unanswered.
8. Be very clear when giving instructions, double check that they have understood. There is nothing more demotivating that not to know what to do and the others are doing.
9. Try to relate the contents of the course with the students’ real and routine life, they will apprehend and remember better when they find a practical sense to that what they learn.
10. Try to promote interpersonal relations among the students when they are online as they spontaneously do when they are face to face.