Interactions in Online Education

Implications for Theory and Practice

Charles Juwah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134247486
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Interactivity is at the very heart of learning and is evident at all levels of engagement, whether between fellow students, students and tutors, online learning materials or interfacing with the learning environment.

Covering both theory and the practical implications of the issues discussed, this book provides international perspectives on key topics including: analysing and designing e-learning interactions, social and conceptual dimensions of learning, interactions in online discussions, interactions in peer learning and professional development of online facilitators.

It is essential reading for all those involved in the design, implementation, management and use of open and flexible learning.

Part I Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives

This first section of the book explores the ubiquitous but important phenomenon of interactivity and interactions in online education. It attempts to provide a definition for interactivity and interactions and types of interactions from a variety of perspectives. Also, the section provides relevant information on the theoretical principles underpinning interactions including new frameworks for conceptualising, designing and evaluating learning interaction and communication. These frameworks are: the model of encounter theory which details elements and encounters that learners progress through to engage and interact with other ‘players’ in the collaborative environment; and a three-level framework for classifying e-learning interactions. The framework for classifying e-learning may be used to (a) design e-learning interactions and alternative e-learning environments, (b) analyse planned interactions to optimise learning and reduce the need for costly revisions, and (c) organise research on interactivity and e-learning to help interpret findings and guide future studies. In addition, this section highlights the focus by practitioners towards more behavioural and motivational approaches that are emerging in this field, and considers how these relate to more socio-cognitive and socio-cultural perspectives on learning and interactions.

1 Theoretical Perspectives on Interactivity in E-Learning

Terry Mayes

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003435-1

The concept of interactivity has become so firmly entrenched within the discourse of educational computing that it is a truism to say that instructional software is interactive and that interactivity promotes learning, and a kind of heresy to dispute it.

(Rose, 1999, p. 44)

Introduction

The term interactivity is used so loosely that, in the field of e-learning, it has become almost synonymous with the notion of learning itself. Nevertheless, there is a widely-shared feeling that if only we could bring the concept into sharper focus we would gain real insight into the nature of learning in general, and of e-learning in particular. Usually, when asked to define the term, colleagues refer to the implication that there are two agents involved in some action, and there is an influence of both on the outcome. However, we also frequently refer to the idea that learners interact with learning materials, so we cannot restrict the concept by defining an agent as necessarily an active participant: one of the agents may be passive information which cannot itself do anything except make itself accessible (note how rapidly one falls into a kind of teleological trap here). In this chapter I will approach the concept by examining the way it is employed generally in e-learning contexts, by discussing its explanatory function at three levels: interaction with concepts, tasks, and people. These three levels correspond to the three stages of learning described in the framework for understanding courseware set out by Mayes and Fowler (1999).

A Framework for Interactive Learning

It is quite uncontroversial to describe conceptual learning as the cyclical development and gradual deepening of understanding (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984). The notion of cyclical development involves the continual testing of a current conceptualisation for adequacy of understanding, which requires testing against criteria of application. In their attempt to provide a theoretical account of learning on which to base an understanding of where technology might add real value, Mayes and Fowler described a cycling through three stages:

• Conceptualisation (interacting with concepts)
  • the contact the learner has with other people’s conceptualisations. This involves an interaction between the learner’s pre-existing framework of understanding and a new exposition. This stage is supported by primary courseware.
• Construction (interacting with tasks)
  • the application and testing of new conceptualisations in the performance of meaningful tasks. This stage involves the building of the learner’s own framework of understanding. The task performance is mediated by secondary courseware.
• Dialogue (interacting with people)
  • the creation and testing of new conceptualisations during conversation with both tutors and fellow learners, and the reflection on these. Dialogue is facilitated through tertiary courseware.

Interactivity with Concepts

First, then, we interact with information, or the representations of subject matter, or, in educational computing shorthand, with ‘content’. Conceptualisation refers to the learner’s current state of understanding about some subject matter. The current stage of development of the learner’s understanding (rather than the attributes of the information) will determine the amount of meaning extracted from the information that the learner is presented with, or accesses. A simple example makes this point clear, and encourages us to think even of this stage as the outcome of a genuine interaction.

A large number of experiments on human learning have demonstrated what seems like an obvious point: we remember only what is meaningful to us (Baddeley, 1996). Yet this seems to beg the important question: how does some to-be-learned material become meaningful? Take the case of a football fan. Hearing football results does not seem like an act of learning: the information slots effortlessly into place, and when the fan is asked later about a particular result he or she will experience no difficulty in recalling it. The information is meaningful because of what is already known: a framework of understanding is already in place. A particular result will convey a great deal of meaning to a fan, and almost none to a football-hater or an American, because of the knowledge (involving a complex network of facts, expectations and opinions) that it activates. In fact, listening to the football results does not seem like the deliberate, effortful kind of learning that we associate with education because in this case most of the learning has already occurred. It has occurred in building the knowledge structures about football that allow meaning to be extracted from the information; the real learning involved here has probably taken place over hundreds of encounters with other people, and in numerous events experienced personally, as well as in the reading of sports pages in newspapers. It is evident in this example that the important variable here is not how the football results are presented to the fan (one can imagine some pointless experiments comparing multimedia presentation of the results with reading text) but how much, and what kind of, football knowledge the fan already has. We only have to observe the problems we have in remembering a telephone number for long enough to be able to dial it, to realise that where the symbols carry no meaning for us, as in a digit-string telephone number, then we have to resort to trying to maintain the information in working memory through conscious attention. We all have a fairly standard limit on how well we can do this: the famous ‘magic number seven plus or minus two’ (Miller, 1956, p. 81– 97). However, another famous study (Chase and Ericsson, 1982) revealed that this limit can be completely overcome by activating existing knowledge to make the numbers meaningful. Many other observations of apparently prodigious memory feats have been made (see Neisser, 1982); all turn out to depend on making the to-be-recalled information meaningful by employing pre-existing knowledge.

In the theoretical formulation of human learning in cognitive psychology, the notion is one of levels of processing. Craik and Lockhart (1975) argued for the understanding of human memory as a by-product of perceptual analysis and that the durability of memory would be a positive function of the depth to which the stimulus has been analysed. Normally only the results of deeper analyses can be regarded as learning, the by-products of preliminary or ‘surface’ analysis are discarded. What is needed later is meaning, and the extraction of meaning involves the deeper levels of processing. Craik and Lockhart viewed processing levels as a continuum of analysis. At one extreme, sensory analysis in the visual or auditory analysis systems will give rise to memory traces that are transient and easily disrupted. At the other end of the continuum, the process of semantic analysis will lead to deep learning and permanent memory.

So the match, or interaction, between pre-existing knowledge, and the information offered in the learning materials, is all-important. The medium of expression of that information is likely to be of only marginal importance for learning. It is not the way in which the information is received that represents the crucial interaction, but the way in which it is interpreted by existing knowledge structures. It was essentially this point that underpinned Clark’s (1983) argument that there were no differences in learning benefits due to employing a specific medium for instruction. Even the opposite position adopted during that famous ‘media debate’ (Kozma, 1991; Koumi, 1994) accepted that the different benefits for learning between media, if they exist, will be due to differences in the way in which information can be located and operated on, rather than to differences in the way the information is represented in the medium. The crucial interaction here is between the form of the new information and the way in which the knowledge that will make sense of it is internally structured. In a sense, the learner acts on the new information by activating an already established schema or knowledge structure. To the extent that the form of representation of the new information can suggest a particular activation, then the possibility exists that a primary exposition – an effective lecture, a powerful notation, an animated illustration – will be immediately effective. Nevertheless, in the learning cycle, the interaction between the learner’s prior understanding and the primary exposition produces only an initial interpretation. Subsequent work must be done to build the new concept into the existing framework.

At first it seems self-evident that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives
• Part II Design and Learning Environment
• Part III Practice
• Part IV Professional Development
• Conclusion
• Index