Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI)

2021 Federal Department of Education regulations require that distance education courses include regular and substantive interaction between students and instructors. For a more detailed description of RSI and how it might be incorporated in a course, see this resource.

Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) dashboard
The image shows a rating scale for types of online instruction to fulfill the requirements for regular and substantive interaction (RSI): the poor RSI example shows a correspondence educational experiences with only video lectures and auto-graded quizzes; the mediocre RSI example shows a course with weekly announcements with due dates and graded assignments without feedback; the good RSI example includes courses that have graded assignments with feedback, weekly announcements explaining content, and video lectures with discussions; the excellent RSI example includes courses with office hours and instructor-initiated discussions.

Resources to help you accomplish RSI

RSI documents

 

* The SUNY Online OSCQR RSI illustration is used with permission from the SUNY Online/OSCQR team under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC By 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.