Beyond the Checklist – Making RSI a Meaningful Practice for Instructors and Students
Takeaways
- Treat RSI as shared practice, not a one-way broadcast, and build all four channels: Instructor → Student, Student → Instructor, Student ↔ Student, Student ↔ Community.
- Start strong in Weeks 1–2: personalized welcome and intro, visible office hours, an academic announcement, and individualized comments on at least one task.
- Make feedback two-way: end comments with a short action prompt, require a quick reply on the first two graded tasks, and follow up within 24–48 hours.
- Structure peer support: pin a “Student Questions” space, co-sign accurate student answers, and offer an optional unfacilitated Zoom study room; tools like Hypothes.is can deepen discussion.
- Connect to community on a schedule: use brief interviews, artifact and analysis “bring-backs,” a mid-term follow-up, and a final product that explicitly cites course concepts and evidence.
By Zach Cureton-Hazard (Instructional Designer, UAF Center for Teaching & Learning) and Kait Hazard (Program Head & Faculty, Applied Business, UAF CTC). This teaching tip blends design lens and teaching experiences into a fully online, asynchronous program to frame RSI as a shared practice.
At most universities, RSI is framed as the baseline for quality in distance courses. The idea is straightforward: interactions are instructor-initiated, predictable and frequent, and clearly academic in purpose. To meet the standard, courses typically demonstrate at least two kinds of instructional activity on a regular schedule, such as direct instruction, timely feedback on student work, answering course-related questions, or facilitating academic discussion.
Quick self-check (Students experience within the first two weeks)
- Have students gotten an individualized welcome and instructor introduction message?
- Are office hours posted and easy to find?
- Has at least one academic announcement been posted?
- Has each student received personalized comments on at least one task?
Meeting this baseline of instructor → student interaction matters because it keeps expectations clear and students supported. This teaching tip invites you to go further by designing RSI as a shared practice, not just a set of tasks. Below, we will map three complementary channels: 1. Student → Instructor; 2. Student ↔ Student; and 3. Student ↔ Community. The article closes with a brief fictional narrative that demonstrates how a course feels when all four channels are working together.
Student → Instructor Interactions
Goal:
Make feedback a two-way conversation, so learning is dynamic.
Example:
Week 1, you’re in SpeedGrader with the first low-stakes task. You leave two specific suggestions and close with “Reply here so I know you saw this. What’s your next step, and by when?” By evening, you’ve received a few replies with concrete plans. You send one-line nudges where needed, then point a common question to the pinned Q&A discussion forum in your class. Within days, students treat feedback like a prompt, instead of the end of a conversation.
Ideas to Try:
- End feedback with an action. Script to paste: “Reply here to confirm you saw this. What’s your next step, and by when?” This makes your expectation explicit and starts a two-way communication habit on day one.
- Require a feedback reply on the first two graded tasks (1–2 pts). After that, keep the prompt but drop the points.
- Allow comments on weekly announcements with prompts to interact: “What’s one question you have about this week’s module?”
- Offer student-initiated 10-minute micro-check-ins as part of your office hours.
- Follow up within 24-48 hours when students reply.
When thinking about student → instructor interactions, we are not talking about the correspondence model where students are initiating all interactions (Clark, 2019). This is about inviting students to continue a conversation. Turning feedback into a brief, two-way exchange helps learners act on comments instead of just receiving them. Predictable instructor presence plus required student responses will increase teaching presence and keep interactions regular and substantive rather than one-way broadcasts. Research on feedback consistently shows that clear, actionable feedback paired with opportunities to respond produces larger learning gains and stronger engagement, and RSI emphasizes visible instructor-student exchanges as imperative in quality distance education. (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)
Student ↔ Student Interaction
Goal:
Encourage students to learn with and from each other.
Example:
You pin a single student question space in Canvas discussions. You prompt students to take the lead in this Q&A space. Encouraging them to answer peer questions before you weigh in on Friday. By midweek, Ali posts a clean example that solves Jordan’s citation question, so you co-sign with a clarifying line and mention it when you sound out the weekly announcement. A few students who never email you directly are starting to answer each other in the Q&A space. Some students have found that utilizing the ungraded, unfacilitated Zoom room link you’ve shared in your course resources is working well to prepare together for upcoming quizzes. The course is transitioning from one way void to a circular collaboration.
Ideas to Try:
There are many different ways to encourage student-to-student interactions in a course. One option that has recently been growing in popularity is the use of Hypothes.is. A discussion tool that facilitates live collaborative discussion on documents and videos. This tool is an excellent way to reimagine the possibilities of discussions in an online course.
Another effective option that facilitates student ↔ student interaction is the practice of creating a discussion board in your Canvas course that is a “Student Questions Space”. It's a space throughout the semester where students can go to post and respond to each other’s questions. This space can also help instructors identify what students are struggling with throughout the course and can guide intervention.
Another option might be collaborating with students to set up a Zoom study group that is ungraded and unfacilitated. This is a space where students can jump on and work through assignments and support each other throughout the semester. Setting up this space models to students that you would like them to connect and collaborate outside of the classroom and outside of graded forums. This space fulfills traditional third spaces found in person on college campuses.
Peer-to-peer interaction builds social presence and shared problem-solving, which are directly tied to engagement, persistence, and deeper learning in online environments (Clark, 2019). When you make help visible and endorse accurate student answers, you transform discussion from busy-work into collaborative problem solving.
Student ↔ Community Interaction
Goal: Build regular (predictable, scheduled) and substantive (purposeful, academic) interactions between students and their communities—and bring what’s learned back into the course.
Example from Kait’s ABUS F263 Public Relations Course:
In ABUS F263, I have students select a local nonprofit or club and move through a sequence of community touchpoints so I can offer feedback at each step. Early in the term, they hold a short introductory conversation with a leader to surface one or two real PR challenges and opportunities. Right after, I ask them to post a bring-back in our course: one labeled artifact (for example, a flyer headline, newsletter snippet, or event metric) and a brief note (3–5 sentences) tying what they heard to our foundational course concepts. Over the next few weeks, they keep a running question list that grows as they connect that initial conversation to weekly content and light research on the organization’s community context.
Kait Cureton-HazardAround Week 10, Kait's students schedule a follow-up conversation with the same contact, guided by the questions they’ve drafted. They return with another artifact + analysis (a quote, screenshot, or metric). They post in forums to generate peer feedback and brainstorm new ways to apply course concepts. Targeted feedback is used to help students sharpen their decisions. From there, they assemble the final portfolio which consists of a five-page PR strategy and a short presentation explicitly citing course concepts and the evidence gathered from their community interactions. For extra credit, some students present their plan and request a brief fit/feasibility comment from the organization. In reflections, students consistently show they can translate stakeholder conversations into strategy scoping goals, mapping audiences, using SWOT (Helms & Nixon, 2010) to name constraints/opportunities, and proposing practical tactics (messaging, channels, feedback loops) with simple success metrics. Often, the relationships they build continue beyond the semester, and students start to engage in their community in new ways.
An RSI Narrative
Imagine you are an adjunct instructor two weeks before the term starts, you’re assigned an online, asynchronous course that was built years ago. It’s heavy on auto-graded assignments, light on interaction, and the syllabus doesn’t invite much instructor presence, let alone peer exchange. With the clock ticking, you begin to wonder what you have gotten yourself into.
Keeping inline with RSI pedagogy, you schedule weekly announcements that preview what matters, connect concepts, and invite questions. You email a short welcome with a course link, office hours, and how to reach you. You tweak a few assignments so students explain decisions, not just click choices. In the opening module, you name how you will show up regularly and substantively, and why it helps them learn. Then you model it: timely, specific feedback in Week 1, quick follow-ups in SpeedGrader, and invitations to continue the conversation.
Within days, the tone shifts. Students reply to your feedback, post earlier, and reference each other’s ideas. The course is feeling more dynamic. You can see who needs support, who’s stretching, and where to aim your next announcement. Your presence is clear, and the expectations are shared.
Now you widen the circle. You invite students to practice the same habits, first with you, then with each other, and then outside the course. Discussions ask them to build on a peer’s point with evidence. Small check-ins become study groups. Applied tasks send them into their communities to interview, observe, or test ideas, bringing those insights back to class. Interaction becomes a habit, not a checkbox.
Looking Beyond the Checklist
RSI has become a focus of the US Department of Education in recent years and university administrators across the country are including RSI requirements for online courses, but it is important to look beyond the requirements and checklists and understand that RSI is simply good pedagogy. Engaging with students through RSI, especially at the beginning of a course, has shown increased retention and success rates when compared to correspondence courses (Clark, 2019). There is a risk to see RSI as a checklist that is required and not see the value that this framework has in course design.
RSI invites students to practice meaningful interactions: asking better questions, building on evidence, and closing feedback loops. The goal isn’t more messages, it’s more meaning. We model presence early, then design small, repeatable moves that help students carry that presence forward. Think of the course as an ecosystem that reaches beyond physical components of your Canvas modules. Your presence establishes norms for students to follow. Your students then extend those norms, first in conversation with you, then with peers, and finally in their communities where course concepts meet real stakeholders.
References
Clark, J. M. (2019). What is regular and substantive interaction in distance education? (Order No. 13885813). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2239975043).
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112. (Original work published 2007)
Helms, M. M., & Nixon, J. (2010). Exploring SWOT analysis–where are we now? A review of academic research from the last decade. Journal of strategy and management, 3(3), 215-251.
