When teaching online, it is important to ensure a high-quality learning experience for students by offering Regular Substantive Interaction, often abbreviated as RSI. Regardless of whether your online course is being offered synchronously or asynchronously, the US Department of Education has established federal guidelines to measure instructor presence in online courses. These requirements serve as a standard to regulate online education to ensure distance learning is engaging, effective, and comparable in quality to traditional in person instruction. Institutions will often rely on this metric during accreditation processes to measure and evaluate the means in which an instructor is engaging with their students.
It’s important to note that these guidelines draw distinctions between Correspondence Education (i.e. Coursera courses relying on self-graded quizzes and self-paced content) and Distance/Online Education (i.e. instructor-facilitated discussions, office hours, assignment feedback).
While online courses at Montclair will possess qualities of both correspondence and distance education, it is important to ensure student engagement through regular substantive interaction. Doing so benefits both students and faculty alike, creating more engaging learning experiences for students while adhering to federal guidelines which risk financial aid distribution if determined to be out of compliance.
34 C.F.R. §600.2 defines a correspondence course as: A course provided by an institution under which the institution provides instructional materials, by mail or electronic transmission, including examinations on the materials, to students who are separated from the instructor. Interaction between the instructor and student is limited, is not regular and substantive, and is primarily initiated by the student.
Distance education is defined in 34 C.F.R. §600.2 as1. Education that uses technology to deliver instruction to students who are separated from the instructor and to support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor, either synchronously or asynchronously. For purposes of this definition, substantive interaction is engaging students in teaching, learning, and assessment, consistent with the content under discussion, and also includes at least two of the following— i. Providing direct instruction; ii. Assessing or providing feedback on a student’s coursework; iii. Providing information or responding to questions about the content of a course or competency; iv. Facilitating a group discussion regarding the content of a course or competency; or v. Other instructional activities approved by the institution’s or program’s accrediting agency.
When teaching online, you will need to be intentional about appearing active and present in courses. Students may not see the hours an instructor pours into the course design process or monitoring course activity behind a screen. Students want to feel a connection with their instructors, and this connection has an impact on student learning experience and outcomes.
Host Online Office Hours and Synchronous Meetings: Meetings can be arranged during office hour blocks or via private meeting times using the Zoom integration in Canvas or other tools. Some students may not be able to meet during conventional business hours so flexibility is key.
Plan for Messages and Announcements: You may want to send regular messages out (i.e., at the beginning, middle, and end of each module) to all students, selected groups or individuals to provide additional information, feedback or recommendations. This is helpful in keeping your course dynamic and for students to sense the instructor’s presence between meetings or activities. If you want to read more about this topic, we recommend Using Announcements to Give Narrative Shape to your Online Course by Nathan Pritts in Faculty Focus.
Provide Ongoing Feedback and Reinforcement: Feedback and reinforcement can take on many forms; email communication, audio recorded comments on assignments, or comments on discussions and class projects. One study found that out of 12 facilitation strategies explored, instructors’ timely response to questions and instructors’ timely feedback on assignments/projects were rated the highest in all four constructs (instructor presence, instructor connection, engagement and learning).
Research has shown that creating a faculty presence can greatly enhance the learning experience in any course! The use of video and multimedia is an excellent way for instructors to build a faculty presence and increase student engagement.
Record a Welcome Video: Before the course starts, you may find it helpful to showcase this on your course’s home page! This will allow you the opportunity to introduce yourself and your teaching strategies and establish any expectations that you might have for your students.
Use Video and Audio Technology to Present Course Materials: This helps establish and maintain a more personal connection with your students since they will be able to see you on screen and develop a sense for you as their instructor.
Incorporate Collaborative Tools: Collaborative documents such as shared notes on Google Docs or a brainstorming session on a Padlet board help bring everyone together to collaborate and share out to the larger group. Alternatively, polling technologies are a great way to engage many students and assess learning as a whole fairly quickly!
Taking time at the beginning of the course to allow you and your students to get to know one another will result in deeper connections and increased engagement. Throughout the course, be intentional about maintaining a sense of community!
Take Time to Establish Class Norms: How would you like students to ask questions? Will you be using the chat? What are the attendance and participation expectations? What should the expectations be around the use of cameras? Be explicit and support students in being able to participate in the way you believe is helpful for them.
Facilitate Student-Centered Learning and Collaboration: Some examples of group work include working through case studies, delivering group presentations, or creating products collaboratively. Canvas groups can be set up to facilitate group communication and collaboration. For courses that have real-time meetups, consider using some of the time when everyone is together to work on and get feedback on their tasks.
Provide Students with Ongoing Support: There may be times in the course when things get difficult, such as busy times in the semester, when you reach expected bottlenecks, or when larger assignments are due. Some ideas to support students during these challenges is to set up synchronous working sessions to check in with students and give feedback on progress. Faculty have also created announcement messages with small pep talks and tips and tricks for success. Regularly invite students to reach out and share your preferred method of contact. Require students (individually or in small groups) to sign up for virtual office hours.
Class discussion activities enable students in online courses to share their opinions and reactions to course content while engaging with their peers and instructor. It allows for more fluid exchanges of ideas which are harder to capture in assignments and exams. To enhance discussions, consider using Padlet or Hypothesis as alternatives or complements to Canvas’ discussion tool to foster greater engagement.
Padlet: Padlet is an online collaborative bulletin board allows students to interact with each other by posting text, links, images, videos, and more! Enables alternative versions of discussion across different templates, such as on timelines, walls, and more.
Hypothesis: Hypothesis is a social annotation tool which connects students to share thoughts and ideas about specific passages within a piece of literature and/or multimedia. You can use this tool to have students annotate course readings with questions and insights.
Students can leverage productivity/collaboration tools to collaborate on small assignments or larger, chunked projects. Implementing online group work requires various considerations, especially in asynchronous online courses, regarding student availability and time management – see the ITDS Teamwork and Collaboration resource for more information. Below are some recommended peer collaboration tools:
Google Workspace: Google Workspace is a suite of collaborative tools, including Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more.
Lucid Spark: Lucid Spark is a synchronous tool for free-form whiteboard activities such as mind mapping, brainstorming, or collaboration. All Canvas users have free access to Lucid.
Canvas Groups: Native group workspace functionality within Canvas enabling groups to communicate, share files, announcements, and more.
When done collaboratively, mind mapping can promote collective knowledge construction and analysis. Mind mapping is a strategy that helps students visualize and analyze difficult concepts. Beginning with a prompt or topic, students identify supporting themes or subtopics and illustrate connections using branches, color, and illustrations (or other media). Students can work in small or large groups to create mind maps to aid in brainstorming, generating outlines, creating presentations, or reflecting on material. Refer to the ITDS Mind Mapping webpage to learn more about mind mapping and compare tools we recommend for this strategy.
Davis, V., Dowd, C., Poulin, R., Silverman, D. (2020, September 16). Pursuing Regulatory Compliance for Digital Instruction in Response to Covid-19: Policy Playbook. Every Learner Everywhere. http://www.everylearnereverywhere.org/resources
