5 Tips to Facilitate the Reflection Process in Virtual Courses

How can you increase the success of your virtual course? How do you know your students are really learning and not just scrolling through screen after screen of content?

For knowledge to be lasting and for that change, we call learning to occur, the process of reflection is essential.

If you want to increase the value of your courses and their effectiveness, invite your students to reflect.

In this blog post, we will talk about some tips to facilitate the reflection process in virtual courses.

What is a reflection and why is it important?

Reflection is the voluntary process of stopping to think or meditate on something in order to understand or study it carefully.

Reflection in learning makes the difference between reading the content and retaining it with the certainty of being able to apply it.

In order to understand and retain it is important to follow some steps:

1 Ask how this learning will be useful to me? because I need it? what is it going to do for me?

2 Apply the knowledge obtained to real-life situations or simulations.

In virtual education, it is necessary to include reflection activities for them to be effective.

Tips to facilitate the reflection process in virtual courses

Stimulates thinking by asking questions

There are different ways and times in the course that you can stimulate your students’ thinking through questions.

At the beginning:

What do they hope to get from the course?
Why are they taking the course?
What do you know about the subject?
What do they hope to learn?
What is your ultimate goal?

Inviting them to think before they start helps them focus on a goal, get motivated, and have a direction.

When they already have the content :

What can it be used for?
How can I apply it?
Is there anything you would do differently?
Do I need to understand something else?
Can I explain to someone what I learned?
How can I solve the problem with what I know?

You Have to apply what you have learned:

Was I able to fix the problem?
What did I learn by applying my knowledge?
What would you do differently?
Do I have any questions that arose when applying what I know?
How can I improve?

Not only should students reflect on the content, you as a tutor should also ask yourself the same questions before, during, and after the development of your virtual course.

You also reflect, in this way you give direction and intention to your work.

2 . Practice constructivism

When students are invited to take a pre-test to assess their prior knowledge, it is a way of inviting them to reflect.

What do I know about the topic? How can I use what I know in this course? And what more do you need to learn? These are questions that can stimulate building on previous learning.

In this way, they will be able to make decisions (another process that includes reflection) as to whether they go on to the next unit.

Provide multiple opportunities to make decisions

With the tools used in virtual education, there are many possibilities for students to decide their own course of learning.

You can design the course in such a way that the student freely navigates through the content and decides according to their reflections which content they need.

Using problem-based learning is excellent for prompting reflection.

Providing scenarios with different answers, choosing different solutions, and reflecting on their results gives the student the opportunity to understand the consequences of the decisions made and to see the content learned put into action.

This answers the question that every student wants to know at the beginning of a subject and that is: what is this going to do for me?

Encourage the student to share

Using forums, chats, or groups on social networks stimulates discussion and debate on some topics.

You can invite them to record videos exposing their vision or audios. You can use various tools to stimulate critical thinking and collaborative learning. This way you keep online education student-centric.

The idea with this dynamic is that some stimulate others with their opinions and ideas.

It includes opportunities to work as a team so that they have to reach agreements and draw conclusions.

From reflection to action, what next?

Ask yourself the question, what’s next? invites students to link learning to the future, their goals, and their work.

This question helps create a bridge between the content and the practical application.

What can I achieve now that I couldn’t at the beginning? What changed in me after this learning? Do I feel ready? Or how can I apply what I have learned immediately? are some questions that motivate students to action.