Communication and Interaction
Effective communication in an online course takes place with a variety of tools including course announcements, feedback, emails, etc. Regular and substantive interaction is a federal requirement for online courses that ensures meaningful engagement between instructors and students. To ensure an inclusive, motivated, and engaged online learning community effective and regular messaging is critical.
Effective Communication is:
Concise
Learners should be able to easily digest your message.
- Avoid overly complex messages with large amounts of text. Leave little room for confusion from the learner.
- Begin the message with the important information.
- Avoid acronyms and content specific words that students do not know.
- Use text styles like bold and italics to bring attention to key details.
Consistent
Create a communication plan to ensure you are providing learners with timely, meaningful, and consistent communication.
- Be proactive and provide communication to students prior to beginning an assignment or activity.
- Set clear expectations at the beginning of the semester for instructor response times and preferred modes of communication.
- Check in with students on a regular basis. For example, host a live Q&A session every Thursday at 3 PM.
- Provide well-timed feedback on assignments and response to questions.
Authentic
Allow yourself to be honest and open with learners.
- Increase motivation by allowing learners to get to know you as a person and not just someone behind a computer screen.
- Be supportive of learners by being an active participant in the learning community. Contribute to discussion boards and other activities with ideas and feedback.
- Take an interest in getting to know students and their educational goals.
- Ask leaners their opinion. Increase motivation by giving learners autonomy.
Balanced
Ensure learners are able to understand the content being presented to them.
- Create accessible content for all learners to be successful.
- Use multiple modes of communication including text, audio, video, and images.
- Try not to overwhelm learners but remain present. Compile important assignments, events, supplemental readings, or other comments into a weekly announcement that learners can expect on the same day of the week.
- Keep communication to the point but allow for learners to ask questions when needed.