Regular and Substantive Interaction: Why It Matters

What is Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI)?

Regular and substantive interaction or RSI is a requirement from the U.S. Department of Education designed to distinguish genuine distance education programs from more passive experiences, such as correspondence courses. The Department of Education describes RSI in its legal definition of “distance education,” but this explanation from Ohio State captures the essence of RSI in simpler language: “Regular Substantive Interaction in distance education refers to meaningful and consistent engagement between students and their instructors or the educational content.” Having programs and classes meet the definition of distance education (i.e., having RSI) is essential because that’s what makes our distance learners eligible for federal financial aid. It’s important to note that the interaction must revolve around the course and not personal or other matters.

The guidelines for regular and substantive interaction, as provided by WCET are:

Regular:

  • Interaction is provided on a predictable and scheduled basis
  • Student success is monitored, and instructors proactively interact with students who need assistance or who request engagement

Substantive:

  • Educators interact with students to provide direct instruction, conduct assessments, and otherwise facilitate learning. Under current definitions, substantive interaction means doing at least 2 of the 5 activities below. *
  • Providing direct instruction
  • Assessing or providing feedback on a student’s coursework
  • Providing information or responding to questions about the content of a course or competency
  • Facilitating a group discussion regarding the content of a course or competency
  • Other institutional activities approved by the institution’s or program’s accrediting agency

* Quoted directly from WCET.

A few notes on instructor-led interaction

According to Oregon State quick reference

  1. Interactions should be initiated by a qualified instructor, and not only in response to student requests
  2. They do not include optional activities
  3. They should be prompt and made within any promised time window (e.g., within 24 hours)

Why does it matter to the university?

As noted previously, regular and substantive interaction separates distance learning from correspondence schools, which are defined by a lack of interaction between a student and any qualified instructors. Universities or institutions that do not meet true distance education requirements may find that their students are ineligible for financial aid. For an example of how this could impact a university, this article explains what happened to Western Governors University in 2017.

Why does it matter to me?

Beyond the regulations and their impact on the institution and our learners, regular and substantive interaction with your students is just good teaching. Students who feel alone in a course with no feedback or interaction with their instructor or peers are significantly less likely to be successful in a course. Distance education is not meant to involve a student completing their work on their own, and research would not suggest that as a best practice. Many of the hallmarks of good online teaching, such as transparency, timely feedback, and creating belonging are also ways to meet the requirements of RSI. Engaging your students is also interacting with them, and an engaged student is more likely to be a successful student.

How can I ensure I am meeting the requirements of regular and substantive interaction?

Below you will find each of the four main components of “interaction,” along with suggestions for meeting that component in a distance education course. Remember that these are examples, not exhaustive lists.

Provide direct instruction

  • Video lectures included in your Canvas course
  • Office or student hours
  • Conferences or check-ins with students
  • Instructor-led study session

Assess or provide feedback on a student’s coursework

  • Personalized individual feedback in text, audio, or video form
  • Responses to blog posts or presentations
  • Outreach to students not meeting standards

Provide information or respond to questions about the course

  • Weekly announcements or videos about upcoming assignments and course content
  • “Message students who” are not participating or not turning in work
  • Prompt responses to student communication that fall within your posted guidelines (e.g., within 24 hours)

Facilitate group discussion

  • Instructor guidance and participation in class discussions related to course content
  • Videos/messages/Canvas announcements about course-related content with students
  • PlayPosit or Hypothesis activities
  • Students interactions via Teams, Zoom, or other chat-based software

Please refer to this handy chart from the University of Alaska Fairbanks for a list of RSI activities that includes those listed above and more.

Does this matter if I don’t teach online?

The RSI guidelines are about ensuring that students who take distance learning courses can interact with and learn from an instructor. From that standpoint, these guidelines are applicable primarily to those instructors who teach online, and to an extent, hybrid, virtual classroom, point-to-point, and point-to-anywhere courses. While the guidelines themselves don’t apply to face-to-face courses, the strategies reviewed in this blog post for interacting with students can be used by instructors teaching in all modalities to engage with their students and enhance their learning.

TL;DR

  • Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) is required for those who teach in distance education modalities.
  • You must regularly include at least 2 of the following in your course:
    • Direct instruction
    • Feedback on a student’s coursework
    • Information or responses to questions about the course
    • Instructor-facilitated discussion
    • Other institutional activities approved by the accrediting body
  • If courses or programs do not provide RSI, they may not be eligible for federal financial aid.
  • Strategies for meeting RSI standards are summarized in this worksheet by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

a large group of smiling students standing by the Phoenix statue

Understanding Today’s UWGB Students: Trends & Strategies for Success

Article by Kris Vespia, Director of the Center of the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL)

As CATL prepares for our semester-long focus on Teaching Today’s UWGB Students, the first step is to identify who those students are. There’s a common narrative out there that UW-Green Bay’s students are fundamentally different today in terms of their academic backgrounds due to our direct admission initiative. There are certainly some ways in which our student body has changed in the last five years, such as the number of high schoolers we serve, but the reality is that there have not been substantial changes in the average ACT score or other academic preparation measures in recent years. However, what is also true is that many of the issues instructors tick off their list of concerns are prominent in national publications today. For example, “Is This the End of Reading?” is the provocative title of a 2024 Chronicle of Higher Education piece that appeared at about the same time The Atlantic published an article highlighting the difficulty of getting undergraduates at Princeton to engage with full texts. A professor from North Central College contemporaneously bemoaned the difficulty students had achieving more than a superficial understanding from readings (Kotsko, 2024). Stories about a “crisis” in college student mental health abound, and statistics support an increase in self-reported anxiety, depression, and trauma (Mowreader, 2024).

If the issues students are facing are not unique to UWGB and its characteristics, what does account for changes in college students over time? Psychologist Jean Twenge (2023) asserts that one large contributor is systematic birth cohort effects. Traditionally aged undergraduates today are members of what is commonly called Gen Z (b. 1995-2012). The first iPhone was introduced in 2007. Think about what that means. Gen Z members and beyond have always obtained information instantaneously and have had it at their very fingertips. Moreover, that information came in easily digestible and often entertaining bits. Is it any wonder that these students would not have much patience with close reading of a long text? Of course, we shouldn’t use “generational differences” to oversimplify the issues. Let’s face it, students of all ages today have different expectations than their instructors probably did in college, given how readily available information has become. If you want to test that out, ask your current students how many of them use TikTok, Instagram, and other forms of social media as a news source.

As we know that behavior is typically influenced by multiple factors, let’s also consider the impact of No Child Left Behind and Common Core on the academic skills that were emphasized in the K-12 curricula that shaped today’s students. What about the pandemic and the learning loss that occurred during that time? It is also not surprising to hear about prevalent mental health concerns in student populations given that it was seen as a “crisis” well before the pandemic hit (Vespia, 2021). Then there are larger economic changes and the cost of tuition nationwide – how has that impacted the multiple roles students must assume? And in what ways has the increased accessibility of education via online learning made it possible for parents and full-time workers to add school to their already-full plates? Finally, let’s not forget AI and the ways in which it makes summaries of articles or a decently written essay just a few keystrokes away. In addition to asking students about the source of their news, you might find it instructive to ask them about their perspectives on the use of AI and academic integrity, which could be quite different from your own.

You may now be asking yourself: so where does that leave us? Well, for one thing, it leaves us in a place of hopefully respecting even more the students with whom we work. They are balancing school with increasingly complex lives in a world that seems to be changing by the minute. It also leaves us with a number of evidence-based teaching strategies, some of which CATL will explore this semester in our blogs and event series. Here are just a few. Did you know, for example, that instructor mindset can play a significant role in achievement gaps among STEM students? CATL looks forward to talking about that research and offering some growth mindset interventions for you and your students. There’s also trauma-informed pedagogy, which does not ask instructors to be therapists, but rather emphasizes creating effective learning environments by, for instance, giving students agency and choice where possible, but maintaining appropriate limits on those choices. Teaching with transparency is another potential tool. Being authentic in the classroom, using the TILT framework in assessment, and demystifying the so-called “hidden curriculum” can all be very effective. You can even find collections of strategies in articles such as McMurtrie’s (2024) “Why Generation Z Gives These Professors Hope.” Ultimately, it’s important to acknowledge the challenges instructors face, whether it’s the use of AI or struggles with student engagement. Validating those frustrations and trying to work through them is essential to good teaching. It’s also crucial to remember, though, that these issues are likely not unique to UWGB. As such, we have many resources to help us as we partner with our students in the teaching and learning process. CATL looks forward to assisting on that journey.

Students repainting the large Phoenix logo on the ground

Teaching Today’s UWGB Students: A Preview of CATL’s Spring 2025 Programming Series

Article by Kris Vespia, Director of the Center of the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL)

One of the comments I have heard the most since becoming CATL Director is some variation on the following: “I just don’t understand students today. They [fill in the blank].” Whether that sentence is completed with “don’t do their reading,” or “balance more than I ever had to,” instructors clearly have a sense that current students are walking a different path than they did in their college days.

CATL has decided to tackle this topic with a connected programming series this semester that will invite everyone to engage not only with the question of who our students are but also what strategies we can use to work with them more effectively. We have constructed a Canvas course of articles and other resources related to “Teaching Today’s UWGB Students,” and we will continue to update it during the term. We are also hosting three events related to this theme. First, on Feb. 17 at 3:30 p.m., we will co-host, along with Student Access and Success, an online panel of secondary school educators from common feeder schools for UWGB. Teachers, student services personnel, and administrators will talk about what they see in today’s high school students and share strategies they find effective in working with them.

After spending time considering student characteristics in February, we will turn in March and April to consider evidence-based pedagogical strategies that research suggests are effective with a broad range of students. On Mar. 7 at 9 a.m., our own Dr. Amy Kabrhel and her brother, Dr. Steven Anschutz, who wrote his dissertation on the topic, will address “Growing Your Mindset,” and CATL will share some practical tips for integrating it into your teaching. On Apr. 4 at 9 a.m., we will welcome former Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Co-Director, current River Falls’ CETL Director, and published author Dr. Cyndi Kernahan for a live online discussion of “Teaching with Transparency,” and how that can facilitate student engagement and learning.

We see these different events as inter-related, and we will offer the opportunity to earn a “Teaching Today’s Students” digital badge if you engage with all three topics by either attending each of the three synchronous events or by contributing to an asynchronous alternative in the Canvas course for any live presentations you miss. Note that we will also have a series of blogs on related topics throughout the semester, such as “Understanding Today’s UWGB Students” and “Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI).”

Please watch Teach Tuesday for upcoming blogs and look for Outlook invitations to the three events described above. We look forward to engaging with you.

Assessment and Assignment Guidance in the GAI Era

CATL is often asked questions about how to approach assessments in the wake of easy access to generative artificial intelligence (GAI). We hope to crowd-source suggestions and examples from our own instructors so that we can build a repository of work from the UWGB community in Canvas. Please take our GAI Assignment Repository survey if you have any ideas or assignment samples that you are willing to contribute. We will collect results and share them once we have a critical mass. In the meantime, please feel free to use these resources from other institutions or professional organizations.

Deterring the Use of GAI

One of the most frequent concerns expressed by instructors is that students will simply use GAI to complete their assignments. It makes very good sense to type your own assignment prompt into Copilot or another GAI tool to see if it can complete the assessment – and modify the assignment if it can. Although these are not perfect strategies, multiple authors have suggested the following mitigation strategies:

  • Be very clear with students about your GAI policy and talk with them about the reasons for it and for completing their work independently. Carleton College has an interesting site aimed at a student audience about GAI use and evolving understandings of academic integrity that you could use to frame a discussion with your class.
  • Use shorter, more frequent assessments that build on each other to reduce the motivation to use GAI that can come with a small number of high-stakes/point assignments.
  • Scaffold your assignments such that each one builds on another.
  • Create assessments that involve integration of material from class (which GAI does not have access to) with other sources.
  • Require some element of reflection on the learning experience or completing the assignment.
  • Ask students to submit outlines, drafts, or save their document history in Word or Google Docs to show the evolution of a paper or project.
  • Consider the use of oral presentations, including question and answer, as a method for demonstrating understanding.
  • Employ in-class writing assignments such as Minute Papers for face-to-face courses.

The Office of Digital Learning at UN-Reno has created a more detailed document with strategies for re-designing assessments in the GAI era.

Teaching About the Use and Ethics of GAI

Some instructors are seeking strategies for teaching students about GAI and how to use it, as well as about related issues, such as the ethics of use. Instructors from the University of Central Florida collected more than 60 assignments related to GAI, including the teaching of prompt engineering. The New School has a shorter, more direct page of instructions for prompt creation. Co-Intelligence author Dr. Ethan Mollick and collaborator Dr. Lilach Mollick have created an extensive paper that outlines seven complex ways to use GAI in education, and they include sample prompts and a discussion of the potential risks of their ideas. Finally, as just one example of teaching about the ethics of AI use, consider this assignment designed, in part, to teach about cultural bias in GAI.

Creating Assessments that Make Use of GAI

Finally, there are instructors looking for creative assignments that use GAI as an intentional tool in an assessment to facilitate student learning. Numerous universities and organizations have assembled collections of such assignments, including the following:

Remember, we hope to create a collection of examples from UWGB instructors. Please complete our survey today to share your contribution with your colleagues!

On Keeping a Teaching Journal

Article by Tara DaPra, Teaching Professor & 2024-25 Instructional Development Consultant

On the last day of the semester, I read the Brendan Kennelly poem “Begin” to my creative writing students, which ends thus: “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending/that always seems about to give in/something that will not acknowledge conclusion/insists that we forever begin.” It’s the perfect poem to describe the commotion of the semester’s end, so when I share this with my students, I acknowledge the desperation many of us feel to get to the other side.

But then what? As the poem instructs, we do it all again. I tell my students that it’s okay if the semester didn’t go just as they’d hoped, that they can try again. They have another semester to accomplish a little more, to do a little better, to become a little stronger. And in the meantime, they should acknowledge all that they have achieved and take a moment to celebrate. And we, their professors can do the same.

What does any of this have to do with a teaching journal?

Whether or not you keep one, you already know what a teaching journal is, but here’s a definition for good measure. In their book Professional Development for Language Teachers, Richards and Farrell define a teaching journal as “an ongoing written account of observations, reflections, and other thoughts about teaching, … which serves as a source of discussion, reflection, or evaluation” (68). If you’re not in the practice of keeping a teaching journal, try responding to formal or informal prompts after an ordinary day of teaching—or a particularly tough one: Which part of today’s class was most successful? Least successful? Did students contribute actively? How did I organize and interact with groups? What did students truly learn?

Richards and Farrell distinguish between an intrapersonal journal, written for oneself, and a dialogical journal, written for another. Many of us learned to keep a dialogical teaching journal as graduate students. In Ohio University’s TA Pedagogy Seminar, teaching assistants are instructed to write at least one entry each week, monitored by the supervising professor. While our teaching today is largely an independent practice, a dialogical journal may still be useful, for example, if you co-teach a course or if you and your colleagues who teach the same general education course wish to compare notes.

But all of us can benefit from an intrapersonal journal, a record of our teaching wins and defeats, a record of tweaks you wish to make the next time you teach the class, that, if not written down, may be forgotten until you repeat the misstep. In a blog post for Inside Higher Ed, “Teach Like You Write,” Daniel Knorr describes his version of a teaching journal, which he does simply by annotating his syllabus during the semester. In this, he acknowledges the influence his students play in his planned revisions. He writes, “I wish my students could see how I will teach this course differently in the future because of their questions and insights. Remembering that this is the beginning of my teaching career and that my students’ learning does not stop when they leave my classroom has helped me focus on the ways I can best teach them now given our other responsibilities and limited time together.”

While it’s easy to use a teaching journal to track the minutiae of day-to-day—this lecture needs to be slower, this discussion fell flat—I admire Knorr’s approach for two reasons: First, he recognizes teaching as a collaborative act, one that our specific students take part in. This requires us to react in real time but also to consider how our students change over the years and decades. We all know that what worked in 2019 may no longer work in the same way. Second, I admire Knorr’s ability to zoom out. He reminds us to see teaching as a vocation we are cultivating: What do I hope students remember a year, five years, twenty years from now? What do I hope to retain and develop in my teaching practice a year, five years, twenty years from now?

Teaching, on a good day, is hard work. Some days that hard work feels deeply gratifying. On others, we may feel a desperation of our own, to get to the other side of the semester, to just be done. (Can’t that Giant Stack of Grading die already?) But we get through it. We always do. And these are the days—the joyous ones and the hardest ones—we ought to pay attention to. Note the tweaks you wish to make but don’t neglect recording the wins. This practice, a kind of gratitude, may help to sustain you.

When I first began sharing with students Brendan Kennelly’s poem “Begin,” this was done on instinct—it just felt right for the occasion. In time, I saw why: it reminds me that what I love best about teaching is the practice, the ability to revise. A teaching journal can help you plot the course.

(You can listen to Brendan Kennelly recite his poem, or, if you prefer, Hozier will read for you.)

Sources Consulted

Howells, Kerry. “The Role of Gratitude in Higher Education.” (2024 Jan). Higher Education Research and Development. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228909266_The_role_of_gratitude_in_higher_education

Kennelly, Brendan. “Begin.” (1999 Dec 1). Begin. Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Knorr, Daniel, “Teach Like You Write.” (2018 Nov 8.) Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/teach-you-write

“Reflective Writing: Keeping a Teaching Journal.” (2024.) Resources for Teaching Assistants. Ohio University. Retrieved from https://www.ohio.edu/cas/about/assessment/teaching-assistant-resources/reflective-writing-keeping-teaching-journal

Richards, Jack C. and Farrell, Thomas S. C. (eds). (2005). “Keeping a teaching journal.” Professional Development for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-84.