Building Interaction Into Your Online Course

You've already decided that you're ready to author online and you have your content organized. Now it's time to face the ultimate challenge in online learning - making it interactive!

Interaction in online courses is a two-edged sword. On one hand you want students to participate. This enhances their learning by letting them question and discuss issues in the course. On the other hand, as the instructor, you need to decide the level of interaction you want to have with each student - and build your courses accordingly.

As an illustration, let me relate a poor choice I made in a course I wrote several years ago. Because I wanted everyone involved, I required that each student post at least one message per week to the discussion group. In addition, I required that they respond to two other messages. Simple? Yes. But because I had decided that my level of involvement was to respond to every posting, I was faced with 3 messages for every student every week - and this was only the minimum requirement! I soon found myself bogged down in responding to an overwhelming number of messages.