Title: Interaction, Collaboration, and Group Work
Course: TOPkit Sample Course Lite > Section: Module 3 - Designing Interactive Course Activities

Notes for Course Facilitator

Summary:

This page defines the importance of online teaching and social presence, identifies tools for interaction, and provides instructional strategies and best practices.

Gentle reminder: Update all content highlighted in yellow to reflect your institution.

Creating Teaching and Social Presence via Online Interactions

Research shows that students work better in groups than in isolation, not just in face-to-face classrooms, but even more so in the online learning environment (Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, 2009; Henry & Meadows, 2008; Maryland Online, 2008). Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence.

Before designing collaborative interaction activities for your online courses, explore what types of interactions will best meet your course objectives and which computer-mediated tools will best facilitate those types of interactions. Moore (1989) describes three types of interaction necessary for quality distance learning courses and programs:

- Learner-instructor interaction, such as e-mails and announcements
- Learner-learner interaction, such as collaborative group work and peer review activities
- Learner-content interaction, such as presenting course contents in an appropriate and motivating format

Your online teaching presence primarily deals with learner-instructor and learner-content interactions where instructors provide learner supports and present content and assessments. The online social presence focuses more on learner-learner and learner-instructor interactions where your students work in groups and seek feedback from you and their peers (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). If you can create a teaching and social presence that facilitates all three types of interactions, your online course will be successful.

Tools for Interaction

There are various tools and technologies available both inside and outside of to help you design your online teaching and social presence. Here are some resources to help you select the appropriate tools for facilitating interactions:

1. The Interaction Matrix (Doc) provides you with a detailed description of tools available in and how they may be used to create interactions in your online course.
2. The following table presents examples of communication technologies. Some of these tools are not available inside <Replace - Your LMS>.

Asynchronous | Synchronous (live) | On Demand
E-mail | Text, audio and video chat | Audio
Wikis | Instant messaging | Video
Blogs | Web conferencing | Animation
E-portfolios | Online office hours | Immersive simulations
Discussion forums | Virtual worlds | 3-dimensional modeling
Social networking applications |  | Interactive multimedia that responds to student behaviors

3. The construction model for online course designs is a graphic tool designed to support brainstorming, planning, and designing course objectives, and how they work with assessments and instructional strategies that use tools in an online course.

Instructional Strategies & Best Practices

Henry and Meadows (2008) summarize aspects of online teaching that reportedly contribute to enhanced learning and student satisfaction. They include interaction strategies such as quick turnaround time by the instructor, frequent and engaged contact, individual feedback, great communication skills, and regular use of student names. There are a number of instructional strategies and best practices located in the next sections.

Teaching Online Strategies

Visit Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository to review the following faculty strategies:

- Group Discussion Strategies
- Group Evaluation Strategies
- Social Networking Strategies: Facebook
- Social Networking Strategies: Twitter

Optional Further Reading

- EDUCAUSE. (2010). 7 Things You Should Know About Assessing Online Team-Based Learning. EDUCAUSE. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ELI/ELIResources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutAsses/210831
  - This article is a quick overview of online team-based learning, how to assess team-based learning, and its implications to teaching and learning.
- Teaching Online. (2011). Instructional best practices using technology. UCF Teaching Online. Retrieved from http://teach.ucf.edu/pedagogy/best-practices/
  - Read more strategies for facilitating collaborations located in the “Interaction” section.
- Faculty Focus. (2010). Student collaboration in the online classroom. Madison, WI: Magna Publications, Inc. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/free-reports/student-collaboration-in-the-online-classroom/
  - This 32-page long report is compiled by Faculty Focus, an online, higher education newsletter, and concentrates on building relationships and communities in online courses. The report consists of 18 articles written by college instructors sharing instructional tips and practices. You will need to create an account with Faculty Focus to download the free report.

References

- Center for Distributed Learning, UCF. (2011). Teaching online. Instructional best practices using technology. Retrieved from http://teach.ucf.edu/pedagogy/best-practices/
- Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT), California State University, Chico (2009). Rubric for online instruction. Retrieved from http://www.csuchico.edu/celt/roi/
- Garrison, R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
- Henry, J., & Meadows, J. (2008). An absolutely riveting online course: Nine principles for excellence in Web-based teaching. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 34(1). Retrieved from http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/viewArticle/179/177
- Jensen, L. (2002). Interaction in distance education (Vol. 2005). Arizona State University.
- Jung, I., Choi, S., Lim, C., & Leem, J. (2002). Effects of different types of interaction on learning achievement, satisfaction and participation in web-based instruction. Innovations in Education & Teaching International, 39(2), 153-163.
- MarylandOnline. (2008). Quality Matters Program. Retrieved from http://www.qualitymatters.org/
- Moore, M. G. (1989). Three types of interaction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 3(2), 1-6.

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.