How Can Interaction Support Active Learning?

Keeping students actively engaged with you, the content, and each other promotes student success. When students are observing, doing, communicating, and reflecting, they are actively working with concepts and people. We describe these activities as interactions. Interaction is at the center of the teaching and learning process. When we move that process online, the way in which students and faculty interact changes. As we re-think how we approach interaction online there are three main types of interaction to consider. While learning activities will differ depending on the content, context, tools, and people involved, there are some strategies that can be incorporated in almost any course to foster interaction.

Student<–>Faculty Interaction

Student↔faculty interaction can include both formal direct instruction and more informal mentoring and support as discussed in the Online Presence module. Regular and substantive student↔faculty interaction is required for courses to be classified as "online courses" and not "correspondence courses" by the US Department of Education and the Higher Learning Commission. Courses considered to be correspondence are not eligible for student loans or to count toward full-time student status.

A few examples of student↔faculty interaction include

providing feedback on assignments, learning journals, or other reflective activities
participating in discussion forums or chats
sending frequent announcements to summarize the previous week or describe the next week
providing online or telephone office hours
mentoring individual learners
working with small groups of students assigned to help teach portions of the course (peer teaching)

Student<–>Student Interaction

Interaction between students can include formal course-related collaboration and interaction as well as more informal social interaction, which can increase students' comfort with each other and with the online environment. Student↔student interaction-based activities include but are not limited to

group projects
group case studies
peer instruction
role playing
synchronous or asynchronous discussions or debates
collaborative brainstorming
peer review of selected work (For more on using Canvas tools to manage peer review, see the Peer Review section of the Instructor Guide.)

Any of these examples can be used on a large or a small scale ranging from semester-long project groups doing research and presenting results to an optional live meeting where those present discuss a short video case or a discussion forum where they brainstorm alternatives to a textbook problem.

Depending on the size of your class, you can encourage student↔student interaction class-wide or in smaller groups or pairs. When working with smaller groups, it helps to emphasize individual accountability, positive interdependence, and positive interaction in grading the group's work (Kirschner, Strijbos, Kreijns, & Beers, 2004). This strategy leads to three grades on a group project emphasizing the three aspects of group work:

individual contribution to the group project
synthesis of the individual parts into a project that shows collaboration, consensus, and learning
working together to encourage and facilitate each other's efforts to complete the project

For more on using Canvas to manage your student groups, please see the Group section of the Canvas Instructor Guide.

Student<–>Content Interaction

Student↔content interaction includes students' concrete interactions with the course materials and their more abstract interactions with the concepts and ideas they present. It is more than just reading a book or watching a video. It includes but is not limited to

tutorials (using text, still images, audio, and/ or video)
quizzes (if the feedback is useful and usable)
web quests (Links to an external site)
reading/video discussion or reflections (Reading a textbook is technically a student↔content activity but explicitly requiring students to reflect on the reading and providing directed prompts for that reflection improves the interaction.)
simulations (like Froguts Virtual Dissection Software)

It's helpful to think through the balance of interaction over the entire course. Particularly, providing activities that offer a range of student-student interaction (from substantial to moderate to light to none) allows students with different preferences for the amount of peer interaction to be comfortable at some points and challenged to expand their comfort zone at others.

Examples of Interactive Online Learning Activities

Key Elements

The keys to developing effective online learning activities are to make them:

include opportunities for active learning
allow for different types of interaction
sequential so each one builds on the preceding one,
include useful feedback on the activities, and
include opportunities for students to think and reflect on what they are learning, how they are learning, and the significance of what they are learning.