Chat sessions and discussion forums are the best places for interaction to take place since they allow for participation by the whole class. On the other hand, instructors are likely to use email or annotated files for providing feedback to students on their assignments or answering questions. If there is one fundamental rule for online instructors it is that timely feedback should be provided to students on their assignments, questions or forum postings. Ideally such feedback should be provided in less than 24 hours. Even if a full response can t be provided, at least an acknowledgement should be sent.
Meaningful feedback means more than just a sentence saying the student is doing well.
Students want substantive comments on their work. The lack of timely and meaningful feedback from instructors is the number one complaint from online learners. The main cause of the problem is that instructors are not online frequently or long enough to provide such feedback. Make use of offline media While someday all the content needed for a course will be available online, this is not currently true. Plus, most students don t have suitable computers with high quality displays to make a lot of online reading feasible.