280 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 19 Developing Learning Communities: Improving Interactivity of an Online Class Pawan Jain Fort Hays State University, Hays, USA Smita Jain University of Wyoming, Hays, USA introduction For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived in hunting and gathering economy until humans made the transition to an agricultural economy. The agricultural society continued until about 200 years ago, when the Western world ushered in the Industrial Revolution. A few decades ago, the industrial economy began to give way to the present day information-based society (Dagget, 1998). The advent of the computer and the Internet were instrumental in changing society to a global, knowledge-based economy or to what is known today as the information age (Crossman, 1997). AbstrAct This study concerns the design and development of online instruction and specifcally targets interac- tion and communication between online learners. Facilitating appropriate and meaningful interactions in designing instruction is a major goal for anyone developing an online class. The guiding question of the study was: how do the instructional design elements and discipline area impact the quantity of learner-learner interactions? The data for this study came from the online courses offered at one of the major Rocky Mountain University. The research subjects and courses were taken from the College of Education, College of Business, College of Arts and Sciences and College of Health Sciences. Forty graduate online classes, 10 from each college, were analyzed. The fndings of this study suggest that the interactivity in an online class depends on group size, grade weight for discussion, use of web 2.0 technologies and multimedia and the discipline it belongs to. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-741-1.ch019