Providing adequate opportunity for student interaction is an great importantance. There are (3) types of interaction, as it relates to teaching and learning. They include: 

Student-Content
Student-Instructor
Student-Student

To be effective, and online course structure must provide ample opportunity for all (3) modes of interaction, including the (student-student) aspect through discussion, collaboration, etc. How do you effectively increase interactive opportunities for  students in online courses, especially those who may be less motivated or struggle with self-discipline? 

Response: This may be one of the greatest dilemmas we currently face in education, especially so,  but certainly not limited to online courses. My background and understanding of instructional design tells me that there are some deep behavioral issues that drive student motivation–or lack there of, based on many factors, but here are a few ideas that may prove to be helpful for many students.

– Ask engagement-based questions. These types of questions often motivate students to become, for a lack of better terminology, I’d like to say “emotionally involved” in the topic of discussion.

– As an assignment or discussion, ask student to provide a reflection on the experience and the knowledge they have acquired.

– Use (Intelligent Agents). This is an iCollege feature that can be used to communicate with  students by sending them a message to alert them that an assignment is closing, past due, late, etc., and can be very helpful in many cases.

– Include some more engaging and interactive components such as lecture videos, but be sure to break them down into chunks of information for specific topics. As a best practice keep them no more than 5-6 minutes–if possible. Long videos of 45 min or more is not a good idea, but sometimes you cannot get around it.

– Include some formative evaluation in the above mentioned videos. This can be low-stakes quizzes, or even extra credit, to enable both you and the students to measure their understanding throughout the teaching and learning process. You can capture the scores and include and/or exclude them from the grades calculation. Kaltura Quiz and PlayPosit are two resources that we currently have available.

– Release a (current grade average) to students throughout the semester. There’s some psychology in this as it relates to human behavior, but I believe this may have an emotional effect on students to stay actively engaged and increase their interactions, motivation and overall performance.