Hello, as an Online Instructor I use several forms of instructional materials provided to students, so that they have the opportunity to examine  and use any and all forms to suit their particular learning styles. These include a twice weekly Live Chat meeting where the weekly assignments are discussed and the course content as laid out in the syllabus is covered throughout the 5 or 10 week course. Grading Rubrics are also posted for each week's assignments. In addition to this, I provide examples for student downloads of these weekly assignments. I follow up daily on the Discussion Boards to keep everyone actively involved, and will also post weekly announcements regarding classroom, campus and administrative activities regarding student-related matters.

One of the biggest challenges is in getting students motivated to attend the Chats, as these are not mandated although students are expected to be watching them (archived) at a more convenient time for themselves.  Motivators I use is to send email introductions days before the class is accessible to students at the start of a session. I encourage them all to attend Live Chat as it will help them round out their learning experience, participate, demonstrate, and become totally engaged in the learning materials in a friendly and informative arena. One of the other techniques I use is to text them each personally, weekly with reminders of what was covered last week and what's to come this week. These are some of the methods I use to encourage students to attend Chats, as it is very easy to "forget" to attend, or get caught up in other things and not show up for the discussions. I also offer students the opportunity to present their projects with a discussion by turning the classroom over to them. This is mainly reserved for 200 level courses where students have developed their skills and confidence levels more than in the 100 level intro courses.  This also allows for an excellent way of structuring formative assessment and then concluding the coursework with a well-structured summative evaluation so that the student has a clear idea of the parth that they are on.

These are some of the techniques I use to reinforce interest in the subject matter and it works! Student engagement in the course is greatly improved.