Advanced Communication - Week One

We just finished the first week of our Advanced Communication class and I have noticed one thing right away.  Students do not take a class very serious unless they are paying for it.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t have good students in the class, in fact I have some awesome students.  However this does mean that out of 32 students that signed up for the class, only a small portion actually showed up for the class.  This makes me wonder how to reach these students in a more succesful manner to get a larger percentage or live students in the class.  In addition, I’m trying to integrate a Moodle environment with the live Edufire class but also am running into difficulty for students to use this service.  Basically, I feel there needs to be consequences for everything in order to encourage students to participate.  I decided to offer one free hour of tutoring to the student that performs the best during the course.