Build - Interaction in Action

As you choose tools and plan for effective interaction in your classes, it helps to think not only in terms of structure and tool choice, but creating processes that are manageable for you, and supportive for your students.

Instructor initiates conversations

It is important that you, as the instructor, initiate conversations with individual and groups of students. This creates a sense that you are present in the class, and that the online tools are important. This is critical in an online class, where the regular means of creating social presence are not available. Regular interaction initiated by you is how students know they aren’t being taught by a robot. To that end, automated messages from online systems don’t really serve the purpose.

You can initiate conversation through many ways:

• Detailed, personalized feedback with students
• Check-in messages, both with students who are succeeding and those struggling
• Weekly review videos, customized for the work students did that quarter
• Direct responses to student posts in a discussion board, offering analysis, commendations, and redirects to move the discussion along

This is one of the criteria which the Department of Education uses to assess “Regular and Substantive Interaction." 

Regular/frequent interaction

These conversations should be occurring frequently and regularly. That frequency will vary as the quarter progresses. Early emphasis, to the point of over-communicating, will speed the process of creating your social presence in the course and building a community among your students. Later in the quarter, you’ll be able to dial back a bit, especially as feedback on assignments takes some of the communication load. In online classes, a good goal is to have some form of personalized communication to students on a weekly basis.

Particularly in online classes, regular interactions are going to be the an important way to assess student learning, and one of the only ways to provide feedback to your students. Through online discussions, students can co-construct knowledge, activate what they’ve learned, and build relationships. Students don’t have the shared space of the classroom to meet and form study groups, so online interactions that build community create opportunities for them to connect in academically useful ways. Many of these interactions will be visible to you, allowing you to assess student progress and learning needs.

Academically substantive

Particularly in online courses, academically substantive interactions both support students’ perception of the presence of the instructor and keep them focused on the course learning objectives. Substantive interactions are:

• Guidance that is related to the academic content of the course
• Personalized detailed feedback about a student’s performance on assignments and assessments (“Good job” or “Great work!” isn’t sufficient.)
• Information that would help a student who did not earn full credit understand how to improve, or help a student who did well on the assignment know what was good about it.
• Not administrative in nature (e.g. responses to student requests to open up a quiz, or emailing a student a reminder to send in an assignment).

This is not to suggest that administrative, and community-building focused interactions don’t have value. However, there should be a healthy stream of content-focused conversation to keep the students learning.

Feedback should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bound. It should clearly tell the students what was successful about their assignment, or how they could improve their grades. Strive for actionable information - what can the student do to improve?