What is RSI?

RSI stands for Regular and Substantive Interaction:

The U.S. Department of Education has issued ruling that all online courses, known as distance learning courses, have to include regular and substantive interaction between students and instructors if students are allowed to use Title IV funds (federal financial aid) to pay for these distance learning courses. If distance learning courses do not meet regulations, they are at risk of being classified as a correspondence course. Correspondence courses are not eligible for the use of Title IV funds. Even though the legal implications of RSI are mainly for online courses, we would like to encourage our faculty at COCC to follow the principles of RSI to enhance the student learning experience across all courses.

Starting July 2nd, 2021 the regulations for a course to be considered to have RSI are:

Regular - Interaction between instructors and students needs to be predictable and scheduled, meaning content presentation or interaction occurs at predictable and regular intervals. Interaction also has to include tracking and intervention, meaning instructors monitor academic engagement and success. The instructor also will need to promptly and proactively engage in substantive interaction with the student preemptively, when needed on the basis of such monitoring, or upon request by the student.

Substantive - The instructor's distance learning course will need to have a list of activities. These activities should include interaction between instructor to student in the form of assessment, tutoring, answering questions, or facilitation of group discussion. These interactions need to be initiated by the instructor.

In substantive interaction, students are engaged through teaching, learning, and assessment as well as at least two of these activities:

providing direct instruction
assessing or providing feedback on a student’s course work
providing information or responding to questions about the content course or competency
facilitating a group discussion regarding the content of a course or competency
or other instructional activities approved by the institution’s or program’s accrediting agency

The good news: If you have built a structured course, you are already accomplishing RSI requirements!

How can we use Canvas to support RSI?

Canvas has features that can help us support RSI. A few ideas...

To enforce predictable and scheduled activities in courses:

When you set up your assignments with due dates in Canvas, the assignment and due date will show up in the Syllabus page in the course summary section, as well as the course calendar.
Canvas will let us set dates and times for when Canvas modules will open to students. We can use this to our advantage to have a clear and scheduled time for when course content becomes available each week.
Make a weekly announcement at the start of the week announcing the weekly activities and expectations for that week. Set a date and time for the release of this announcement, preferably at the same time of the same day each week, to promote your instructor presence and remind your students that you are an active participant.

To regularly assess and monitor student progress and provide meaningful feedback on student work:

The Canvas Speedgrader tool can help you make feedback comments quickly in multiple forms. Add annotations, embed text, use a speech to text tool, leave a media comment (audio or video), or attach files to leave helpful feedback for your students right on their submitted assignments.
Visit the Gradebook often to view progress. There are organizational and sorting tools inside the Grades tab that can let us sort by grades low to high, view who's missing an assignment, quickly message students, and view analytics of a student or the whole class. Monitor who is not participating and intervene as early as possible. Together we can use this tool to hopefully assist in our engagement and retention of students.
The New Analytics tab in each course can show you quickly who is viewing your content, at what times, and for how long. Run reports to view late or missing assignments and overall student activity. It's fast and easy to use!

Other RSI interaction ideas:

Respond to questions - Provide further resources in an area that all students can access, like a Q&A Discussion (instructor-student interaction).
Engage your students using Discussions - Go a step further and summarize their insights in a timed weekly discussion summary announcement (student-student interaction).
Create assignments with due dates for your paper or physical hand in assignments - This will make the assignment and due date show in the course summary on the Syllabus tab (content-student interaction).
Set up Quizzes - Not just automatically graded quizzes- utilize practice quizzes and graded/ ungraded surveys to enhance learning and collect information from students (instructor-student and content-student interaction).
Office hours - Planned, synchronous option for communication that can encourage further discussion (instructor-student interaction).

For more information or a deeper dive into this subject, let the eLearning department know and we can send you more resources!