In a face-to-face class, students have many opportunities to interact individually with the instructor before, during, and after class. This interaction can be an important factor in a students’ success. Opportunities for interaction online can be plentiful as well, provided you design and facilitate your course to bring about one-on-one interaction.

To facilitate this online conversation, Karen Kirkendall, psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield, uses what she calls “personal learning spaces” in her online courses. These are individual Blackboard discussion groups that she creates for each student, where she interacts with students individually. These personal learning spaces enable one-on-one interaction and provide a way to document each student’s progress.

Students submit all their assignments to their personal learning spaces, and Kirkendall provides feedback within that space in several ways. For informal assignments, she will respond in a thread on the individual discussion board. For more formal assignments, she will respond with a score and the student’s assignment with inserted comments as an attachment.

This type of interaction is a more effective means of communication than email, Kirkendall says. “I find email to be very discontinuous in interacting with students. I don’t care for it at all. My students do contact me via email, and that’s fine, but I don’t feel I have any way of connecting with my students in a continuous way through email.”

Kirkendall uses these personal learning spaces to provide students opportunities for continuous improvement, much like a portfolio. She encourages students to turn in assignments early by offering them feedback on each version of an assignment. “They can turn assignments in again and again. I have students engage with me over a particular exercise as many as five or six times until they master it. I’m trying to model the [interaction] we see in the on-ground classroom setting, where we know that the students who have more interaction with faculty, whether it is before class, during class, or after class, the more they learn,” Kirkendall says.

For ease of use, Kirkendall divides these personal learning spaces into meaningful units rather than having all the semester’s assignments in a single forum. For example, one unit might be on textbook chapters 1 though 7 and include 10 exercises. Kirkendall also has multiple forums for different phases of writing assignments. For example, in her adolescent development course, she has students develop interview questions and conduct interviews with adolescents. For this assignment, she has each student submit their interview questions for review before doing the interview in a separate forum (“to make sure they’re not asking outrageous questions”) and the finished interview in yet another forum.

These individual discussions are not the only interaction in Kirkendall’s courses. Each course also features extensive use of group discussions. Since providing a high level of individual interaction takes a lot of time, Kirkendall sometimes uses an online peer tutor to help with the group discussions. The tutor is a student who has taken the course and other online courses and helps facilitate discussions, chats, and group sites, and addresses technology problems.

The peer tutor asks questions (many of which Kirkendall has provided in advance) and keeps the discussion on track. These discussions are intended to get students to apply the course content to real-world issues that “[don’t] always come off as you think they would.” And every once in a while discussions can get heated. This is why it is important to have somebody monitor the discussion continuously.

Kirkendall starts each discussion, even when she is not the main discussion facilitator. She also reads all the responses to make sure the students are not being rude or disrespectful. She also ends the discussion with a summary of the discussion and feedback on it.

Contact Karen Kirkendall at kkirk1@uis.edu.

This story first appeared in the newsletter Online Classroom. Click here for more information and to subscribe.