Module 4: Course Interaction/RSI (Overview)
Completion requirements
Introduction:
One of the major concerns students have about online courses is that they’ll be made to teach themselves from provided materials. Even courses with plenty of context and personalized content – video or written lectures from the instructor, for instance – can feel like they’re built for students to work through on their own. This is one of the reasons that consciously constructing interaction in your course will be beneficial.
Interaction Design
Courses typically support three kinds of interaction: between the
student and the content, between students, and between the student and
the instructor. This module will review these.
Learner Expectations:
This module is built for asynchronous participation, meaning you
can complete the online pieces at any time. We estimate that completing
the readings and activity in this module will take approximately 2.5
hours.
- Read the Overview (good work, you're all done!)
- 4.1. Course Management: Interaction Planning
- 4.2. Let's Interact with the Rules about Interaction
- 4.3. Article: How much ‘work’ should my online course be for me and my students?
To complete this module, the following activities must be finished with a score "pass" or "complete":
OSCQR Standards related to this overview:
The Online SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric that we use in Academic Technology has an entire section that focuses on interaction and its benefits to student learning. There are seven that are related to this section and they are:
- Standard 38: Regular and substantive instructor-to-student expectations, and predictable/scheduled interactions and feedback, are present, appropriate for the course length and structure, and are easy to find.
- Standard 39: Expectations for all course interactions (instructor to student, student to student, student to instructor) are clearly stated and modeled in all course interaction/communication channels.
- Standard 40: Learners have an opportunity to get to know the instructor.
- Standard 41: Course provides activities intended to build a sense of class community, support open communication, promote regular and substantive interaction, and establish trust (e.g., ice-breaking activities, Course Bulletin Board, planned Office Hours, and dedicated discussion forums).
- Standard 42: Course offers opportunities for learner to learner interaction and constructive collaboration.
- Standard 43: Course provides learners with opportunities in course interactions to share resources and inject knowledge from diverse sources of information with guidance and/or standards from the instructor.
Those standards reflect research that recommends opportunity for
interaction be woven into the course from the start, allowing
students to get to know their instructor, to know that they’re
learning beside others, and to have a chance to contribute to the
content in the course from their own diverse experience. This dovetails
well with the call for “humanizing” online courses, started by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, that the California Online Education Initiative have supported.
Last modified: Monday, 8 November 2021, 5:07 PM