5 Key Elements of Social Presence: Part 3 Interaction Intensity
This blog is the third of a five part series on the 5 key elements of social presence. It is based on an article from the September/October edition of Learning & Leading with Technology magazine. The article, written by Amy Garrett Dikkers, Aimee Whiteside, and Somer Lewis, is titled Get Present: Build Community and Connectedness Online.
Interaction Intensity
This element of social presence measures the amount and quality of interaction in your online course. This interaction can take place in the form of student-teacher communication, student-student interaction, and student-content interaction.
The Instructor Involvement and Affective Assocation portions of this series address the student-teacher interaction in great depth.
Student-Content interaction happens when we choose highly engaging content for the students to access. Games and interactives are great choices to boost engagement in content.
Achieve Virtual Staff: View the Resources tab of the AVE Teacher Workroom to see bundles and videos on open educational resources where you can find that type of content.
Student-Student interaction is very important to us at Achieve Virtual. Much of this semester’s professional development has focused on this type of interaction. We specifically have talked about the use of discussion boards to provide students a way to interact with each other.
If you would like more information on student-student interaction with the use of discussion boards, please reference the following My Big Campus bundle (You do not need to have a MBC account to view this resource). It includes several strategies for integrating discussion in your courses easily.
For those of you particulary interested in this topic, view the following MentorMob playlist of websites/journal articles on interaction in self-paced online courses.
MentorMob is a great website that allows you to curate digital content for your students. I love using it to collect and sequence resources. It is also a great site to begin your web searches. I always find a lot of quality information here.
Self-Paced Online Course Interaction (MentorMob)
Again, I encourage you to visit the article where the idea and much of the content for this blog series originated. It is a great resource for virtual school teachers.
