The 5 Kinds Of Online Forms You Might Want To Look Into

If you want your online business to succeed, then you will need to learn a bit more about website development overall. The best way to do this, though, would be to turn to apps to help you out. This way, you can save as much time as possible while building up your website at the same time. One of the key elements that you should focus on when it comes to this would be online forms.
 
Every day, online forms get filled up all over the World Wide Web. As a matter of fact, these forms play vital roles in a lot of online interactions, including checkout processes, community sharing, feedback collection, business leads gathering and research. Here are the 5 kinds of online forms you might want to look into.

The Contact Form
A contact form is the most basic online form available out there. It usually contains three fields or less: name, email address and message. Naturally, this can be changed as needed, though. Generally speaking, a contact form can make a website look professional while providing two particular benefits. First of all, you can keep yourself safe from spammers; and second of all, visitors will have an easier time getting in touch with you when they have to.

The Event Registration Form
If you plan on organizing a conference, but aren’t sure how many people will actually attend or which capacity hall you should book, the easiest way to get your answers would be to simply ask your readers directly. One easy way to do this would be through an online event registration form. This type of online form will basically collect the contact information of the attendants, but you can also make your form more flexible by adding the ‘Attending’, ‘Not Sure’ and ‘Not Attending” options for a clearer picture overall if you want.

The Lead Generation Form
People who own and maintain blogs know how important it is to have a mailing list. After all, while tweets and Facebook updates are easy to miss nowadays, emails will almost always get noticed at some point. In fact, this is why a lot of big online businesses work so hard to grow their mailing lists nowadays. Naturally, in order to do the same thing, you will need an online form maker to gather people’s emails first. This can be done through an online lead generation form, which you can use on your website’s landing page to get more contacts for sales. If you want, you can even offer incentives in exchange for their contact details, such as free downloads or trials. This way, you won’t just nurture your mailing list, but you can potentially make yourself stand out in people’s minds, as well.

The Order Form
If you want to sell products or services online, you will need to come up with a framework that your customers can use to make their orders. This is where an online order form would come in. This type of online form will basically let you sell your products and services online sans the ‘shopping cart’ in case you don’t have a lot of merchandise to sell to begin with. The best part is that you can easily integrate this kind of form with your choice of online payment gateways as needed.

The Survey Form
It is common knowledge that businesses need market research in order to succeed. Otherwise, they could end up losing a lot of energy, time and money. Well, thanks to the survey form, you can now survey potential customers before actually wasting any time or money on product manufacturing – easy peasy!

David Miller is an educational researcher who has vast experience in the field of teaching, LMS Systems and online training. He is associated with prestigious universities and many leading educational research organizations. He’s also an ed-tech veteran, currently pursuing research in new eLearning developments, and is a contributing author with ProProfs.

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Developing Online Courses That Encourages Student Participation

Online courses provide learning institutions with a way to broaden their educational reach and teach more individuals. Nearly every type of learning can be taught in an online environment, giving instructors and course designers the freedom and flexibility to go beyond the limit of the classroom and teach in ways that would have been unimaginable before the commercialization of the internet. As the world of online courses continues to evolve and expand, not only in a K-12 and higher education setting but also in corporate training systems and other adult education environments, the challenge of ensuring participation by everyone is a constant concern.

Some of the bias against online courses is the inability of the instructor to physically engage learners in the same way as in the classroom. Some suggest that learners in an online environment simply turn their computer screen on are engaged in a monocratic process with no interaction with the learner. Whether that is actually true is an eye of the beholder opinion; however, the way in which an online course is designed has more to do with the level of interaction and participation an instructor will receive.

A Critique of Early Online Learning Environments
One of the problems with the earlier designs of online learning was the belief that the limits that are intrinsic to teaching learners in the classroom (i.e. size of the room, available supplies and equipment, time, etc.) do not exist outside of the classroom. The instructor's role, based on some technically designed course, was to provide their content in a static format, handout out a login and sit back and watch the learners learn. What took place unfortunately was with the lack of a human presence, such as a moderator or facilitator for the learning, learners were less apt to fully participate and as a result found the online experience dissatisfying. Much of the online learning that was created in the early days focused on the tools used in delivering the learning as oppose to a focus on the learner's needs. The missing element in this type of tool-centered learning was the social presence or process of socialization needed to sustain a learner's attention and motivation to participate in the course.

The Reason for Student Participation in Online Courses
Learning institutions are moving toward the development of learner centered courses that appeal to the different perceptions of learning (i.e. modalities of learning). The absence of an instructor's physical presence needs to be simulated in a way that gives online students the full sense of the classroom and classroom participation. Utilizing techniques that incorporate live discussion, multimedia webcasts, polling and other forms of interaction give students the opportunity to share their personal experiences with other learners. The institution of a pedagogical approach to online learning is important because of the demographics of the online learner. Undergraduates make up the vast majority of people who attempt at least one course online (82.4 percent). Those individuals who are of Generation X (born 1965-1980) are the majority of online distance learners (many using online courses as a way to learn new skills or finish previous degree requirements) with those in Generation Next (1981-2000) in line to become the largest population of online learning consumers. The age range for these two groups is 18 (those born in 1995) to 48, meaning that adult pedagogical learning models must be developed to produce greater student participation.

A Social Constructivist Approach to Encourage Student Participation
The word "constructivism" and social constructivism is being used more and more to describe the types of successful learning environments that yield effective student participation. A constructivist approach involves the construction of knowledge in a learning setting by including the importance of the learner's culture in relationship to the learning. Creating small groups and collaborations among online learners helps the learner discusses and debate learning in order to build on or reinforce existing knowledge. Changing the way online courses are developed to account for the needs of the learner will help make courses stronger, impactful and more able to deliver their desired outcome.

Sameer Bhatia is founder & CEO of ProProfs.com which is a leading provider of online training plateform  for building, Online testing, and applying knowledge. Sameer has a background in technology with a Masters in Computer Science from USC (University Of Southern California) and is an ed-tech industry veteran. You can find Sameer on Google+.

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