Student Engagement Events: How to keep students engaged and involved

Attention, all higher education event organizers: Are you feeling out of step with how your students want to connect these days? In the age of hyper-connectivity through countless social media channels, it can sometimes seem daunting to convince your students to engage on yet another platform. How do you vary the networking opportunities for an online poster session or assure that your incoming first-year students feel taken care of in a virtual orientation? This is where a dynamic virtual event platform like Accelevents comes into play because making things easy for everyone is our specialty.

This article will provide tips and tricks to fertilize the ground for students looking to make friends, connections, or get to know your school better! Virtual event engagement options are far more plentiful than you may think, so let’s get started. 

Are you concerned that your students won’t feel immediately drawn into a virtual event platform? These suggestions will stimulate their minds and inspire them to create relationships in which they were previously uninterested. Let’s get creative!  

Help your students optimize their profile information

First things first.  We at Accelevents have carefully thought through how your students might feel comfortable interacting within our platform. Like most platforms, this starts with creating an excellent profile with lots of customization options!

Our profile accessories are plentiful, from creating a personalized video intro to customizing how and when you would like to be contacted for a one-on-one meeting. We include an option to confirm pronouns and provide dedicated space to link social media accounts if interested. The event administrator can also create unique interest tags students can select from within their ‘My Profile’ settings. This will set eager participants on the fast track to meeting like-minded peers! 

Utilize our lounge feature to diversify connection opportunities 

Upon their initial introduction to virtual connection, most people envision a standard grid-view Zoom-style interface. While we do offer a similar style with lots of dynamic capabilities, we also seek to add more options for themed connections beyond the typical meeting room format. Our lounge feature helps combat that dreaded Zoom fatigue with a connection style that will cleanse your students’ palates after sitting through a long session or keynote presentation. 

In essence, our lounge feature option provides a specialized connection. Instead of emptying attendees into a virtual hall of one hundred people, our lounges are specific and often smaller virtual rooms where students can browse and talk with people in the same particular interest group. Each distinctive lounge has a facebook-style feed, a place to add photos, and a video option if they want to connect face-to-face.

Schedule breakout rooms within our workshop sessions

Accelevents provides a breakout room option for event administrators to utilize if they want to enhance engagement within a workshop session. Breakout rooms are an excellent resource for event planners who want to encourage discussion amongst smaller groups following a session. 

For example, if a particular workshop session began with a talk outlining a class syllabus, the teacher would also have the option to create breakout rooms for various student project groups if applicable. 

It’s helpful to take a walk if your brain reaches analysis paralysis, and it’s crucial to vary your interaction strategy if your attendees are feeling restless. Breakout rooms are a malleable tool to put in your ‘keep the students awake’ toolkit. 

You can do it! 

To summarize, holding the attention of any audience can be tricky, and college students are no exception. Keeping the event format fluid will help with the glazed-over eye syndrome. You know your event will be stellar, and now it’s time to make space for your students to see it too!