Middle States is coming, and the college needs to document that all faculty teaching distance education (DE) courses are demonstrating regular and substantive interaction (RSI) in those courses.

It is critical, of course, that the institution continues its accredited status. It’s equally important, I would suggest, for the future of SCCC that we can say proudly that we are offering high-quality DE courses that are built upon meaningful, robust and regular interactions especially between instructors and students but also in the realm of student-to-student and student-to-content interactions.

When I read publications about DE, the worst feeling comes from seeing evidence of student complaints like the following:

• “It was terrible; I felt like I was teaching myself the entire time.”
• “I hated it. It was just reading the textbook and taking quizzes and tests that were automatically graded all semester.”
• “I was doing the work but needed help, yet even though I kept emailing the professor, they never responded to me. So I finally just stopped participating and ended up getting an F.”

This is absolutely what we cannot have, so the FA is happy to help members better understand what RSI means and how to demonstrate RSI in your courses.

Also, you should know that this has been a federal regulation since July 2021. We have been writing about it in The WORD since then, and college administration has been promoting professional development around it since then through the Center for Innovative Pedagogy, now called Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). So the college’s position is that faculty have had three years now to understand what does and does not count as RSI and should be prepared to be observed in their DE courses.

DE observations: Be prepared

For the college to document for Middle States that we are not running mere correspondence courses, chairs must observe faculty who are teaching DE courses. This is mostly focused on fully asynchronous courses, but our other DE modalities include hybrid courses, real-time online and combined online courses as well.

The FA contract explains that, as with any observation, your chair must give you at least 48 hours notice before your class is observed, and the chair will have 24 hours of access to your course. Because the contract language was negotiated to be as parallel as possible to the on-campus observation experience, chairs have a student view of your online course materials (just as they have a student view in an on-campus class).

There should be a pre-observation meeting and a post-observation meeting as well. These are critical so that you can respond to any questions from your chair about in what specific ways you are achieving RSI and show them concrete, specific examples. For example, sometimes chairs cannot see evidence of instructor-initiated feedback in the Discussions area or elsewhere, and faculty will claim that they send a lot of emails to students. In that case, the chair will ask you to show those in your SCCC email sent folder (they do not need to read the substance of the emails, of course, but you should be able to show that they exist and show the date when they were sent.)

Below, I share some information and advice about the two major components of your DE class that chairs will be evaluating:

1. Course design
2. Regular and substantive interaction

A clean, well lighted place

Just as Hemingway’s 1933 short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” values spaces that provide some order and comfort against nothingness, the most effective DE courses are built in a Brightspace class website that is clean, clear and well organized from the students’ perspective. That last part is important because sometimes faculty organize the Brightspace class website in a way that seems most logical to them and/or makes things easier for them—but it’s not the most organized from the student point of view.

Most importantly, students should be able to readily understand where the syllabus is and find instructions on how to get started in and move through your specific class. (The college provides a great place to help students learn to navigate Brightspace in their Brightspace 101 for Students course; click the waffle menu in Brightspace and search for it by name.)

To help faculty with this, last spring I developed and shared two Brightspace class modules for faculty to download, import into their own Brightspace shells, revise and use. The syllabus module subdivides your course syllabus into separate pages which makes it easier for you to direct students to a specific page or policy that they need to review and easier for students to access and read on mobile devices.

To prepare for your observation, it’s wise to look at your class website from your students’ point of view, have a colleague sit with you and see if they can navigate the basics, talk to current or former students about how easily your class website is navigated and/or to meet with someone in the Center for Teaching and Learning to review it.

When the chair observes the class, they will be looking to see that it’s obvious to students what is due and when as well as how the students should submit their work (typically in the Quizzes, Discussions or Assignments areas). In my classes, for example, I not only have the weekly schedule of assignments in the syllabus module but I also pull it out as its own stand-alone module called Weekly Schedule.

The Content modules should have instructor-created materials and should be organized by week or by the chapters, units or sections covered in your class. There should be clear instructions to students what they are required to do each week, with appropriate deadlines.

CTL can also help review your class website to make sure your course materials are ADA compliant. For example, we advise against uploading your syllabus as a Word document or pdf file but if you do so, you need to ensure that it is ADA compliant.

Regular, substantive and instructor-initiated interaction

During observations, chairs will also be looking for evidence of your regular and substantive interactions (RSI) with your students. And while instructor-student interaction is prioritized, they will also have an eye out for student-student and student-content interaction.

A poorly designed DE course is one in which students exclusively or primarily interact with the content and/or the publisher-prepared materials such as the textbook and publisher-created PowerPoints, quizzes and exams. We know that some disciplines do need to rely more heavily on publisher material—and spend a great deal of time selecting a department-mandated textbook because of the valuable materials associated with it. That is fine.

However, the publisher cannot be the “teacher” of the class. You are the instructor of record, and you are the one being paid to teach that class. Therefore, chairs have been directed to look for evidence that you are the one providing substantive, regular and instructor-initiated instruction to your students.

• Substantive refers to the substance of the course content. This means that merely posting reminders each week about due dates, your office hours and other mechanics of the class are not considered substantive. However, for example, providing written or audio feedback to student coursework in groups or individually does count as substantive.
  
  
• Regular refers to the frequency of your substantive interactions. In a 15-week course, this would mean at least once if not twice a week. For our 7.5-week (micromester), six-week (summer) and three-week (winter) terms, this would need to be appropriately prorated.
  
  For example, in a wintersession class, because 15 weeks of work is compressed into a mere three weeks, each wintersession day is the equivalent of one week’s worth of fall or spring semester work; therefore, faculty should be actively interacting with students every single day.
  
  
• Instructor initiated emphasizes that faculty need to proactively be reaching out to their students. Make sure your chair sees evidence of this during your observation!
  
  To be clear, it is insufficient to merely post an announcement, say, on a Monday morning that notes, “Here is what’s due; email me if you have any questions” and have that be your sole interaction with students for the rest of the week. So if students are only reading a textbook chapter and completing an automatically graded quiz with no individualized feedback from you for that week, this fails to meet the federal RSI requirements.

The Center for Teaching and Learning has an entire page devoted to helping faculty understand regular and substantive interaction, including:

• An RSI handout that provides background and context on RSI as well as specific advice on what does and does not count in terms of RSI
• A rubric for RSI assessment to help ensure that you achieve RSI

FA members in CTL Robin Hill and Alexandra Belanich have worked hard with Dean Carol Hernandez to prepare and distribute these materials, so put them to good use! For decades that office didn’t have its own dedicated website—back when it was Office of Instructional Technology (OIT) and then Center for Innovative Pedagogy (CIP)—so we are very happy to see that the Center for Teaching and Learning has developed their own website as well as these useful resources.

Take the time right now to revise and refresh your DE courses to be prepared for your upcoming DE course observation. Do it for Middles States, do it for yourselves... but most importantly do it for your students.