**3. Instructional design to improve engagement in online learning**

With the studies reporting disengagement of the students in the online learning, educational institutions should plan to design appropriate learning activities and improve the learning environments. e-Learning Engagement Design (ELED) is a framework which can be added as common step in instructional design models to incorporate best practices for student engagement in online learning (**Figure 2**) [13].

Instructional design tasks start with identifying instructional needs of the learner and constructing a learner profile with all strategic information related to the learner. An analysis of the learning environment and the components of the online instruction along with the learner profile would enable the instructor and instructional designer to find out the problem in the instruction and the performance problem. The second phase starts with analyzing the instructional objectives and instructional goals which the students need to achieve to demonstrate their understanding. The third phase of the ELED framework is where most design and development tasks are performed. Both active and passive online learning activities should be investigated to plan strategic changes to improve levels of interaction and engagement. However, the most critical component in the student engagement is the role of the facilitator and how the online facilitation in different learning activities are carried out. Media selection is also a key task in the design process. The selection of the media for online student engagement requires consideration of interaction between the learners and the technology and, the role played by the media elements in the learner-learner, learner-course material and learner-instructor interactions. Formative assessment integrated with each type of online instruction helps to identify learner misunderstandings, misconceptions and mistakes and should be closely associated with the quality of feedback to be provided to the students. The fourth and final phase ends with the analysis of the summative assessment activities covering both learning and instructional effectiveness. Investigation of the alignment between the learning outcomes, online learning activities and tools of the summative assessment would indicate the gaps in the administration of the suitable online learning activities. To improve the student engagement in the online learning, engagement indicators of the academic challenge (i.e., learning strategies, reflective learning, higher order thinking), learning with peers (i.e., collaborative learning, group discussions), faculty experience of the student (i.e., teaching practices, student-faculty interaction) and campus environment (i.e., supportive campus environment, quality of interactions) should be investigated. Apart from the planning of strategic changes in the online instruction, administrators should also plan for developing the overall learning environment.
