Online Course Peer Review

Rubric Standard V.1 reads: The course design provides learning activities to foster instructor-student, content-student, and if appropriate, student-student interaction.

As someone who teaches online, takes courses online, and reviews the online courses of others, it’s safe to say that interaction requirements of different instructors vary WIDELY! Some instructors build regular group discussions into the weekly course tasks and actively participate in these groups. Others prefer to forego the discussion board/group activities and rely solely on email for interaction. As the rubric standard above implies, some courses are more suitable for student-student interaction than others (psychology vs. medical terminology, for instance). Speaking from my own experience and the feedback I receive from my own students (I teach psychology and health courses), some degree of learner-learner interaction is desired in an online course and instructor-learner interaction is vital!

Examples of learning activities that foster different types of interaction:

• Instructor-learner: Self-introduction, discussion postings and responses, feedback on assignments, evidence of one-to-one email or pager communication, etc.
• Learner-learner (if appropriate to the class): Self-introduction exercise, group discussions postings, group projects, peer critiques, etc.
• Learner-content: Essays, papers, self-assessments, projects based on readings, videos, and other course content, etc.

Parts of this information come from the rubric annotations which were adapted from MarylandOnline’s Quality Matters projectsponsored by aU.S. Dept of Education FIPSE grant.