Build - Developing Effective Interactions

Interaction in your online courses builds engagement between you and your students, students and each other, and students and the course materials. One research study (Jaggers and Xu, 2013) found that interaction was the only statistically significant indicator of student success in online courses. The structures built into your class will serve several goals:

  • Providing feedback on assignments, quizzes, and other class activities
  • Creating opportunities for active learning and engagement with the materials
  • Co-constructing knowledge with students
  • Building community in the course (particularly for online courses)
  • Helping students develop etiquette for online student-to-student interaction

For face-to-face and hybrid classes, the challenge is continuing the community built during the in-class sessions into the online part of the class. In online classes, all of the interactions will be online, so the challenge is to develop effective relationships in a short amount of time.

One way to think about interaction in your courses is Social Presence. Social presence refers to “the degree to which a person is perceived as a ‘real person’ in mediated communication" (Gunawardena, 1995). Your goal as the instructor is to convey both the importance of the online components of the class, and that you are a real human who is involved in the course and supporting your students’ learning.

The following questions can help shape your plans for the communication structures and strategies in your course:

  1. Do the student learning outcomes include student-to-student interaction? If so, what are those outcomes?
  2. How could students' conversations and engagement support learning in your course? 
  3. What questions could you ask students to create meaningful dialog about the course content? 
  4. How could you include your students' experiences in the course? 
  5. How could you use collaborative activities to assess student learning?

At a more practical level, consider the following questions:

  1. For hybrid and face-to-face classes, which interactions are best conducted in Canvas or other tools, and which are best in a classroom setting? How can the different settings complement each other?
  2. For online classes, should interactions be synchronous (all parties to the exchange are communicating at the same time, like a phone call) or asynchronous (all parties interact, but at different times, e.g via email or a discussion board)?

References

Jaggers, Shanna Smith and Xu, Di. 2013. “Predicting Online Student Outcomes From a Measure of Course Quality. Links to an external site.” CCRC Working Paper No. 57. Community College Research Center, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, NY. Also available as “How Do Online Course Design Features Influence Student Performance? Links to an external site.”, in Computers and Education, April 2016, vol. 95, pp.270–284.

Gunawardena, C. N. (1995). Social presence theory and implications for interaction collaborative learning in computer conferences. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1(2/3), 147–166.