The BilBea Learning Journey

The term ‘interaction’ has been misused and “carries so many meanings as to be almost useless unless specific submeanings can be defined and generally agreed upon.” (Moore, 1989, cited in Yacci, 2000).

“There are four major attributes to the concept of interactivity:

• Interactivity is a message loop;
• Instructional interactivity occurs from the learner’s point of view and does not occur until a message loop from and back to the student has been completed;
• Instructional interactivity has two distinct classes of outputs: content learning and affective benefits (social presence and satisfaction);
• Messages in an interaction must be mutually coherent.” (Yacci, 2000, emphasis added)

Figure: A completed message loop between two entities (Yacci, 2000).

“[I]nteractivity in instruction must occur from the student’s point of view” (Yacci, 2000, emphasis added).

Figure: Two steps in a completed loop as (a) the teacher asks a question and (b) the student responds. The loop is complete from the teacher’s perspective, but not complete from the students perspective (no feedback) (Yacci, 2000).

Figure: The same interaction from the student perspective. The loop is not complete (Yacci, 2000).

Student’s Perception of Interaction (or not)

“An interesting issue regarding the perception of interactivity occurs with branching computer based training in which the instructional program selects different paths based upon student responses. Such an interactive system may not appear to be interactive to the student; because a student does not see the alternative branches, the program may appear to be linear to the student. Even though the program is responding, the student may not sense that the system’s displays are predicated on his or her message. Unless the student sees that he or she is skipping material, or being led to remedial material, the student may not actually perceive the computer’s differential responses as interactive.” (Yacci, 2000, p. 5)

Response Lag

“Student entity A sends a message to teacher entity B. Teacher entity B may not read a message for several days. After reading the message, the teacher responds within minutes. To the teacher, the apparent response lag is nil; lag time has been effectively mediated by the storage medium. However, from the student point of view, there was a significant response lag; the student had to wait several days to get a response. The student’s ability to re-read a copy of his or her original message can no doubt help to lessen the perceived response lag. However, it is likely to be disconcerting to the student to receive a response to a message sent weeks earlier. Often, original message intent is forgotten. Response lag from the student point of view would therefore appear to be an important variable.” (Yacci, 2000, p. 11)

(as cited in Swan, 2004).

References
Swan, K. (2004). Relationships between interactions and learning in online environments. Retrieved March 9, 2008, from http://www.sloanc.org/publications/books/pdf/interactions.pdf

Yacci, M. (2000) Interactivity Demystified: A Structural Definition For Distance Education And Intelligent Computer-Based Instruction. Educational Technology 40(4): (pp. 5–16), Retrieved 9 April, 2008, from http://www.it.rit.edu/~may/interactiv8.pdf