Regular Substantive Interaction (RSI)

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Regular Substantive Interaction (RSI)

On July 1, 2021, the U.S. Department of Education signed into lawwhich requires that all online courses for which students receive Title IV funds include Regular Substantive Interaction (RSI) between the instructor and student and that instructors must monitor student academic engagement and success. Regular Substantive Interaction (RSI) regulates the use of Title IV funds in distance learning in Higher Education Institutions. If an audit by the federal government or our accrediting body (HLC) should occur and a course lacks RSI, the course would be considered correspondence rather than online. Correspondence courses are ineligible for federal financial aid money. During an audit, if an online course is found to be correspondence due to lack of RSI, Title IV funding will be lost.听

RSI Improves Learner Satisfaction and Engagement

Beyond compliance, RSI is essential to providing effective online education! RSI establishes and maintains teaching presence (critical to effective online instruction), giving students the sense that their instructor is actively engaged, continually facilitating learning tasks, and providing social interactions in their courses.

RSI helps in reduce the feeling of separation between the instructor and the student.听 Incorporating RSI into online course design and teaching practices has been associated with higher student satisfaction with their learning and higher levels of student engagement in online courses.听

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Defining RSI
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Regular + Substantive Interaction = RSI

Regular Interaction requires consistent engagement between the learner and instructor through:
Note: Grading, feedback, assessment, or instruction provided by automated scoring in the LMS, 3rd party tools (e.g. publisher homework systems), etc. rather than directly from the instructor do not qualify as regular substantive interactions.

Substantive Interaction is the direct interaction between the online learner and the instructor to engage learners in course teaching, learning, and assessment activities. Substantive Interaction must include at least 2 of the following:
Regular Substantive interaction (RSI) must be initiated by the instructor and can occur only between the instructor and student Student to student, student to academic advisor, student to other personnel, student to content, adaptive learning, and artificial intelligence do not constitute RSI.
Characteristics of RSI
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In their Everett Community College shares the following information on characteristics of RSI.
- Instructor Initiated
  To count as 鈥榬egular and substantive,鈥� interactions need to be started by you. Students should not be discouraged from contacting you or asking questions 鈥� far from it! However, you should expect to take an active part in initiating and guiding a range of interactions with your students throughout the semester. This ensures that interactions are not optional and left up to each student鈥檚 discretion, instead, they are an integral part of your instructional plan for the course.
- Frequent and Consistent
  Interactions with students should be reasonably frequent and consistently repeated throughout the term. This means that once a course begins, long intervals of time should not pass between the interactions you initiate with students. The mode of interaction may vary throughout the course, depending on your aims and the needs of your students, but the regular cadence of interactions you establish should remain as consistent as possible. Daily communication is not required, but at a minimum, you should seek to interact with every student at least once each week and you should log in to the course every 1鈥�2 days.
- Focused on the Course Subject
  Interactions should be connected to the subject of the course and contribute to the student鈥檚 progress toward course, program, and college learning objectives. Routine procedural interactions, such as reminders of upcoming deadlines, are not 鈥榮ubstantive鈥� on their own; neither are activities like assigning grades unless they are accompanied by personalized feedback or suggestions for improvement. This does not mean that interactions designed to welcome students or building classroom communities are not important, merely that they are not sufficient by themselves.
Promoting RSI in your Online Courses
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Use the ideas below from to start promoting RSI in your online courses!
- Set Clear Expectations in the Course Syllabus.
  The syllabus is a good place to tell your students how you鈥檒l communicate with them as well as, how you expect them to communicate with you. Let students know how frequently they can expect to hear from you when you will or will not be available to respond to messages, and how quickly they can expect a response to questions and to work they submit. If you have participation expectations for your students, be sure to include those as well鈥攅specially if they affect students鈥� grades.
- Send course announcements or email messages at regular intervals
  Announcements often focus on procedural information, like reminders of course deadlines, but they can also support instruction. For instance, a weekly announcement can: synthesize and then comment on questions from the previous week; note trends observed in assignments; or highlight, contextualize, or illustrate key concepts students will encounter. Try to establish a general rhythm for course communications, using a pattern consistent with the structure or thematic organization of the course. Regardless of their frequency, instructors can treat announcements as genuine invitations to the subject matter of the course rather than mere reminders.
- Provide timely, individualized, and in depth feedback to students
  Research shows faculty feedback is most beneficial when it comes soon after students submit work, so avoid lengthy delays in providing students with comments about their progress. Feedback can take many forms: written comments, audio or video notes, individual conferences conducted in person or via online meeting tools, and so on. In all cases, though, feedback should go beyond simply assigning a grade or automatically displaying pre-written comments or general statements (鈥榞ood work鈥�, 鈥榥eeds improvement鈥�, etc.). Effective feedback communicates to students both what they have accomplished and areas where they may need to improve. It also often offers examples and concrete suggestions for actions students can take in the future to make further progress in their learning.
- Actively facilitate discussions and chats.
  A common misconception about online discussions is that faculty should not play an active role in facilitating them. While it鈥檚 true that a hands-off approach can be appropriate in some contexts, there are many benefits to facilitated discussions. Consider posting regularly to course discussion forums in order to pose guiding questions related to the academic subject; propose counterpoints or alternative points of view that students may not be considering; establish connections among students鈥� ideas; engage in Socratic dialogue; and provide encouragement for students who may be struggling with the complexities of the subject. If the only voices regularly present in discussions are those of students, your course is missing a valuable mode of online instruction.
- Conduct regularly scheduled online review sessions, tutorials, office hours, or individual appointments.
  Online office hours provide a forum for students to ask their own questions, but they can also be used to supplement instruction in more intentional ways. For instance, you might incorporate brief structured lessons at the beginning of an open-ended study session. While it is important to not artificially limit the flexibility of online instruction, you might suggest that students meet online at times mutually convenient for both themselves and you. For example, you could make it a requirement for students to participate in regularly scheduled synchronous (real-time) online sessions. You must ensure that these sessions are communicated to students during registration and clearly specified as part of the course requirements outlined in the syllabus. Completely asynchronous courses cannot require synchronous meetings of any type.
- Choose online tools and learning environments that make interactions easy - and easy to document.
  When selecting online tools or platforms, consider carefully how they are likely to affect ease of communication for you and your students. When possible, select ones that help you document your communications. Email, discussions, chats, or the 玩偶姐姐 Online gradebook will do this automatically. But it's a good idea to apply extra scrutiny to external platforms, such as those operated by publishers. These can sometimes be difficult to access after a course has concluded, making it hard to go back later to retrieve messages or feedback you gave students. If you do use publisher platforms, be sure to have a plan for documenting interactions in the course; this will help ensure you鈥檙e prepared in case you are asked to provide evidence of regular and substantive interaction in the future. At WIU, publisher platforms must be integrated through 玩偶姐姐 Online to help document attendance and test scores.
- Collect mid-semester feedback from students.
  Every course and faculty can benefit from mid-course student feedback. You may already use midterm surveys or other types of formative assessment to find out more about your students鈥� perceptions partway through your classes. If so, consider adding a question or two about interactions in the course. For example, you can ask students whether they feel they hear from you frequently enough, what types of interactions they consider most valuable, or whether they have expectations about interaction that are not being met. Once you鈥檝e considered your students鈥� responses, tell them what you learned and what (if anything) you intend to change during the second part of the course.
  As with all midterm feedback, this is also an opportunity to ask students to reflect on their own contributions to the class. Invite students to suggest one or two changes they could make to enhance interactions or to help those interactions contribute more fully to their learning. This will help reinforce the idea that a successful course depends on the efforts of both teachers and students. It may also give you a few new ideas to help students engage more fully with one another and with you.

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