Abstract:

One of the key challenges for teachers in online teaching is how to create and maintain good interaction both between students and between teacher and students. There has been a lot of research on social interaction in e-learning and its importance for learning. Many studies show that online interactions have a positive impact on learning outcomes as well as on student satisfaction and positive feedback from online learning.

Students value the opportunity for meaningful conversations and interaction online, both with the teacher and with other students. On the other hand, lack of meaningful social interaction in online learning is detrimental and significantly lowers students' ratings of the quality of online learning.

2digi2 was a two-year project, 2022-2023, involving teachers and staff from twelve University language centres around Finland. The aim of this project was to create concrete resources for university language teacher to improve the quality of their online teaching. In the project there were four main themes:
1) new learning objectives for the digital age,
2) generic skills needed in a digital environment,
3) students with special needs in the digital environment and
4) relationship building in a digital environment.

In this paper I will present good practices and ideas to support university teachers in designing and delivering quality online learning that have been recognized during this project. I will focus on how to create and maintain good interaction and build meaningful relationships online.

I will present the results of the student survey about online interaction (2Digi2 2023), which received seventy-seven responses from different universities. Ninety-two percent of students felt that a positive atmosphere during an online course helps to build better interaction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents felt that seeing other students' images on the computer screen was important.

In the project we also conducted focus interviews with several teachers about social interaction in online learning. In my presentation I will also report the ideas and practices that experienced teachers provided especially concerning asynchronous online teaching. I try to answer the question: How to build interaction and community between teacher and students if communication is technology-mediated and asynchronous? The results show that in asynchronous teaching, providing audio or video feedback can personalize the student experience; it makes the teacher seem present and creates a sense that the student knows the teacher.

Keywords:

Online learning, interaction, relationship building.