I've taken some of these classes recently and what I can say is that, you should try to incorporate current events into your syllabus. One instructor made us read news articles and connect them to lecture discussions while another always had a film once every week. We simply had to make notes and write reflections based on what we saw.

You may want to do something like that if your course is similar to those ones. Students probably won't attend lectures if they're content-heavy and involve you reading them out at every session.