3 Interactive Courseware Features to Keep Students Engaged in Learning

Making learning fun and hands-on is a great way to engage students, help them retain more information, and encourage them to connect prior knowledge with new information and experiences. 

That's why Edmentum creates interactive content and activities for Courseware, our standards-aligned, mastery-based curricula for grades 6 through adult learners. Below, we highlight three ways Courseware supports active, engaged long-term concept retention.

Guided Notes

When learning new material, it’s helpful to have a study guide handy to help analyze and retain information. A favorite among educators and students alike, Courseware’s guided notes help learners actively engage with their tutorials. 

These interactive PDFs, available in essential Courseware courses, are designed to serve as instructional scaffolding and help students slow down, meaningfully interact with the material they're learning, and break down information into consumable pieces to improve retention and reduce cognitive load.

Students typically have their tutorial open in one window and their guided notes open in another to fill in any blank fields. Once complete, students can save notes to their device and refer to them later when studying for mastery tests. Students who prefer handwriting their notes can print the PDFs as well.

Clarifying Big Ideas Tutorials

Students who struggle in math and English often do so because of misconceptions they might have around their learning process, such as the benefits of reading, thinking about their own thinking, understanding bias, and finding more than one way to a solution.

To help address common misunderstandings in core content, we’ve designed Clarifying Big Ideas (CBI) tutorials. These standalone, mini tutorials empower students to take an inquiry-based, metacognitive approach to their learning and focus on key concepts.

Our English 10 and Algebra 2 courses, for example, offer a total of eight CBI tutorials per course—four per subject, per semester—that encourage students to engage in their learning through reflecting on their own learning process, interactive check-for-understanding items, and click-to-see “think-alouds” that model inquiry-based thinking.

Project-Based Learning Activities

Activities that incorporate real-world problems help students connect what they’re learning in school to practical applications beyond the classroom. We’ve designed several project-based learning (PBL) activities to help students develop higher-order thinking, increase student agency, and provide opportunities for sustained inquiry.

PBL activities usually start with an essential question that students must answer over the coming weeks by gathering information, evaluating and consolidating sources, and creating a multimedia presentation that synthesizes what they’ve learned. These activities allow students to take ownership of their own learning process.

Visit our course catalog to view more than 500 courses, including core subjects, courses for use with Advanced Placement® exams, career and technical education (CTE) offerings, electives, world languages, and ELL Foundations courses to help learners build English-language proficiency.