Factors Influencing Interaction and Collaboration in Online Environments

by Belinda Allan, Michael Corbett, Toni-Maree Pettigrew and William Murphy.

Note: To listen to this paper click here.

Abstract

Interaction in online education has been linked to lowering attrition rates and greater student satisfaction. Educators are now trying to maximise the level of interaction in their courses so as to maximise the educational benefits. However interaction doesn’t happen by chance and needs to be purposefully designed into every aspect of the course content with relevant and interesting interactive activities. The educators themselves need to change their role in order to best facilitate and guide for maximum interaction. And finally the course needs to consider the learners in order to cater for their learning style preferences and increase the level of social presence. With all three major factors working in harmony within the online environment interaction can be maximised for greater student and learning benefit.

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that attrition rates in distance education are generally greater than those in traditional higher education and can be as high as 50% (Moore & Kearsley, 1996; Ross, Morrison, Smith, & Cleveland, 1990, cited in Wheeler, 2006). Rovai (2002), Anderson (2004), Pelz (2004) and many other authors, agree that the reason for this is that many students of distance education, and especially online education, experience physical isolation, lack of personal attention, lack of visual and verbal cues, and lack of intimacy and immediacy such as lack of eye contact and lack of personal proximity. In other words, there is a sense of dissociation in learning and lack of a sense of community.

Building a community of learners that feel involved leads to learners developing interrelationships and therefore reducing the dropout rate by increasing student satisfaction levels (Tinto, 1993, cited in Rovai, 2002). Interaction between learners with similar interests and common goals creates a sense of community (Westheimer & Kahne, 1993, cited in Rovai, 2002). Therefore, interactivity is one of the essential elements of a community (Rovai, 2002).

There are three kinds of interactivity that help to build a learning community in online courses, interaction with: content, instructors, and other learners (Moore, 1989, cited in Swan, 2001). These interaction types do not function in isolation in reality, for example, student to student interaction requires the instructor to design that interaction into the course content (teacher/content interaction) and facilitate and support the interaction (student/teacher interaction). However the following figure serves as a useful guide for thinking about interaction types that need to be designed into an online course.

Figure 1: Three Interaction Types (Anderson and Garrison, 1998, cited in Anderson, 2002).

Swan (2001) found that clarity of design, interaction with instructors and active discussion among learners significantly influenced students’ perception of learning and satisfaction levels. This paper focuses on these major factors, starting with designing the learning environment for maximum interaction. Then it discusses the extremely important role the instructor has to play as a facilitator of learning. And finally a look at interaction from the students’ point of view with their varied learning preferences and examining the barriers to learning in an online environment.

Designing the Learning Environment for Interaction

In a traditional environment, learner interaction flows, regardless of design, as it is supported by the learners sharing the same physical space. However in an online environment, interaction and learning design are inextricably linked (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1996; Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Jonassen, 1994). Online teachers are unable to:

• instantly guide or alter activities to encourage more interaction,
• encourage participation and interaction just by their presence,
• change design during the learning process to promote deeper interactions and conversations,
• gauge learner interaction and engagement, or
• always have all learners in the same space and time.

Creating opportunities for meaningful interaction and online conversations is the result of methodical design decisions made after considering the complex interrelationships between pedagogical approach, content, Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools, learners and context (Valanides & Angeli, 2005) and learning outcomes. As a result interaction occurs by design, ensuring critical interactive and conversational points are invisibly embedded to assist learners in constructing their knowledge. To achieve interaction by design, contemporary learning designers need to be equipped with a range of strategies, tactics and tools to apply to a variety of different learning situations.

However, planning and designing for an interactive, conversational learning space online takes considerably more time than for traditional classes (Garrison & Anderson, 2003; Collins, 1998). To assist design processes, educators need a design model that provides guidance in ensuring that interaction is embedded into the learning design. One model that supports this approach is the Community of Inquiry Model (see Figure 2) (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000, cited in Moore & Anderson, 2003, p. 116). This particular model identifies three areas: social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence, and suggests that all three need to be present to create an educational experience. Using a framework like ‘Community of Inquiry’ creates checks and balances for the educational design to support the creation of a community of learners to learn, work, collaboratively inquire, and explore a particular topic area.

Figure 2: Community of Inquiry Model (Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 2000, cited in Moore & Anderson, 2003).

Type of Presence	Strategies to Create Presence
Social Presence	Assigning smaller sub-groups within the larger group each with their own unique area. Creating a more personalised and familiar environment for the learners. Housing social discussion spaces such as a coffee shop or introductions area where learners can talk freely and become familiar with each other.
Cognitive Presence	Designing of learning activities that require learners to actively engage in a meaningful way with the content and collaborate with other learners. Examples would include: problem-based learning, experiential learning, authentic learning activities, and scenario based learning.
Teaching Presence	Providing: a teacher profile, virtual office hours, email and phone contact details, and sending weekly communication updates.

There are numerous ICT tools that support various forms of online interaction; we are really only limited by our imagination. The key to adopting ICT tools is providing learner access to instructions on how to use the tool, and selecting and using tools with the appropriate features and capabilities to support the activity and the learning outcome (Valanides & Angeli, 2005).

Facilitator’s Role In Supporting Interaction

The traditional role of an instructor as the ’sage on the stage’ or an authoritative disseminator of knowledge is now seen as a ‘guide on the side’ through a shared learning process (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1996) otherwise known as a facilitator of the learning process. The teaching and learning ‘dance’ is one that has traditionally been led by the instructor with the student following passively. Learning is now becoming a student led instructional dance where students lead movements, direction and pace while instructors follow in step, provide assistance and enhance the experience (Boyer, 2004).

With this change of role, the online facilitator requires a range of new skills from technical/computer skills to a strong ability to develop social presence amongst the learners and themselves, in doing so creating a sense of community within the online classroom. Instructors need to actively support “the natural development of relationships” (Schwier, 2001, p. 6) within these learning communities in order for the learning process to be successful (Palloff & Pratt, 2000).

Rovai (2007) suggested some of the following list of skills that the facilitator needs in order to develop the community. The facilitator needs to be able to:

• develop social presence in the virtual classroom,
• avoid becoming the centre of all discussions,
• attend to issues of social equity based on culture or gender,
• increase the status of low status students in order to promote equitable collaborations (Rovai, 2007),
• model attitudes and values (Moore, 1993),
• counsel, support and encourage learners (Moore, 1993), and
• generally maintain group harmony (Rohfeld & Hiemstra, 1995, cited in Collins & Berge, 1996).

The facilitator must also scaffold student interaction by “modeling appropriate interaction and facilitation techniques on screen, and by providing metaphors and analogies to personalize and humanize the transactional space.” (Collins & Berge, 1996).

The role of an online teacher is one of becoming a facilitator of learning, whilst maintaining social presence, maximising media potential, integrating student support, and coordinating all activities (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1996). This ‘facilitator role’ can be broken into the four hats model (Maor, 2003) as if the facilitator literally had four hats that they could put on and take off at any given time. These hats are:

1. The pedagogical hat
   • Providing feedback and instruction,
   • Probing, asking questions, stimulating the discussion,
   • Synthesising students’ comments, and
   • Referring to outside resources or experts in the field.
2. The social hat
   • Setting and maintaining social presence,
   • Setting a positive tone, and
   • Keeping the communication flowing.
3. The managerial hat
   • Designing and coordinating the unit, and
   • Overseeing tasks and course structure and requirements.
4. The technical hat
   • Helping and guiding in the use of technology, and
   • Maximising media potential.

Facilitators need to develop a sense of immediacy with the learners in the virtual classroom. Immediacy refers to the psychological distance between communicators (Swan, 2002) and can be enhanced by the use of emotion, humour and self-disclosure. As Wheeler (2005) suggests bridging the psychological or perceptual gap between students and tutors may be the most important role a teacher can perform in the digital learning environment.

Catering for the Learner in Collaborative Environments

To make learning in an online environment a positive and motivating experience students need to feel that they have a sense of being ‘real’ in the virtual world as they would in the face to face environment. In other words, to have a ’social presence’ online. The level of social presence has a significant impact on student satisfaction levels and the amount of critical thinking and collaborative learning and depth of discussion that takes place (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison & Archer, 1999). Social presence is defined by Xu (2005) as a “feeling of community, awareness of people and involvement in community processes”. It is suggested by Pelz (2004), that the learner needs to show themselves as a ‘real person’ with a personality. In a course without social presence, the learners may feel frustrated and learning becomes less effective (Xu, 2005).

Students value opportunities to interact with peers and teachers and devalue courses that offer little or no interaction or feedback as these courses only add to their feeling of isolation (Andres, 2002). However, learning can also result from minimal to no interaction at all, with the discussions going on around the learner, whilst the learner is reading and observing, or learning “vicariously”. Vicarious interaction takes place when a student actively observes and processes both sides of a direct interaction between two other students or between another student and the instructor. Interaction in this sense is not first hand, but one level removed, hence the term vicarious (Sutton, 2001). The type of student who may prefer vicarious learning is the introverted student who may be withdrawn, shy, or reluctant to participate in overt interactions (Sutton, 2001). Therefore, learning vicariously or a student’s lack of participation ought not to be punished by assessing or mandating participation, instead students’ interaction in a course needs to be encouraged and appreciated with feedback.

One classification of the many learning style preferences that learners may use is called VARK, or Visual, Auditory, Reading/writing and Kinaesthetic sensory modalities that are used for learning information (Fleming & Mills, 1992). Instructors need to understand their students’ learning styles in order to adapt their teaching methods. Where possible, text, verbal, and visual information should be used to cater for these differing learning styles (Ally, 2004). An awareness of different learning styles aids in the instructional design and ultimately the retention of students in online courses (Diaz & Cartnal, 1999, cited in Rose Grant & Thornton, 2007). In addition, exposure to different learning styles, and perspectives increases student versatility and ability to adapt to real world situations (Rose Grant & Thornton, 2007).

Another factor that has a major influence on students’ motivation, course engagement, and learning achievement is the instructor’s presence and social interaction (Jung, Choi, Lim & Leem, 2002; Shin, 2003). In learning communities, learning is a joint activity between a beginner and an expert, with the expert guiding the novice in this jointly undertaken activity by providing demonstrations, giving explanations, and offering support. Distance or online learning is generally devoid of face to face support, and students often have problems understanding course information. This deficit can lead to frustration, anxiety, and other negative emotional responses (Carnwell, 2000, cited in Wheeler, 2006). Therefore instructors of online courses need to provide technical and emotional support as well as normal social interaction and other support systems to avoid these negative reactions in learners and maintain a positive virtual classroom.

Conclusion

In order to decrease drop out rates, teachers need to develop a sense of community (Rovai, 2002) within the online learning course. One of the essential ingredients in developing a sense of community is interaction between learners, teachers and the content. Three of the major factors in developing an interactive course are:

1. designing interaction into the course by developing tasks and strategies around the community of inquiry model using cognitive presence, social presence, and teacher presence;
2. facilitating and actively encouraging interaction using the 4 hats model – the pedagogical, social, managerial and technical hats; and
3. catering for the learners’ learning style preferences, allowing for vicarious learning (rather than penalising it through grades) and building an environment where social presence is encouraged.

“A major challenge for today’s online instructors involves creating a consistent level of interaction that fosters academic learning and cultivates a community atmosphere” (Muirhead, 2004). Designing interaction into the course along with facilitation skills whilst keeping the learner in mind, will help to develop a community of learners with trusting relationships, high levels of interaction and a feeling of belonging, thus reducing the feeling of isolation in distance learning.

References

Ally, M. (2004). Foundations of educational theory for online learning. In Theory and practice of online learning (p. 3-31). Athabasca, Canada: Athabasca University. Retrieved August 8, 2006, from http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/300/athabasca_univ/theory_and_practice/ch1.html

Anderson, T. (2002). Getting the mix right: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. In ITFORUM Paper #63.

Anderson, T. (2004). Toward a theory of online learning. In Theory and practice of online learning (p. Chapter 2). Athabasca, Canada: Athabasca University.

Andres, Y. M. (2002). Art of collaboration: Awesome tools and proven strategies. In TechEd. Long Beach: Global SchoolNet Foundation. Retrieved January 21, 2008, from http://techedevents.org/LongBeach/Proceedings/RT%20804.pdf

Boyer, N. R. (2004). Who’s in charge? a system of scaffolds that encourages online learners to take control. Paper presented to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, (Chicago, IL, October 19-23, 2004).

Collins, M. (1998). I know my instructional technologies: It’s these learners that perplex me. DEOSNEWS, 8(9).

Collins, M., & Berge, Z. (1996). Facilitating interaction in computer mediated online courses. Paper presented at an FSU/AECT Distance Education Conference, Talahasee, FL (June, 1996). (Retrieved February 8, 2006, from http://www.emoderators.com/moderators/flcc.html)

Fleming, N., & Mills, C. (1992). Not another inventory, rather a catalyst for reflection. To Improve the Academy, 11, 137-143. Retrieved April 23, 2008, from http://www.vark-learn.com/documents/not_another_inventory.pdf

Garrison, R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-learning in the 21st century: A framework for research and practice. London: Routledge.

Grant, M. R., & Thornton, H. (2007). Best practices in undergraduate adult-centered online learning: Mechanisms for course design and delivery. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 3(4). Retrieved April 23, 2008, from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol3no4/grant.htm

Gunawardena, C., & Zittle, R. (1996). An examination of teaching and learning processes in distance education and implications for designing instruction. In M. Beaudoin (Ed.), Distance education symposium 3: Instruction, ACSDE Research Monograph. No. 12 (pp. 51–63). University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University.

Jonassen, D. (1994). Thinking technology: Toward a constructivist design model. Educational Technology, 34(4), 34-37.

Jung, I., Choi, S., Lim, C., & Leem, J. (2002). Effects of different types of interaction on learning achievement, satisfaction and participation in web-based instruction. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 39(2), 153-162.

Maor, D. (2003). The teacher’s role in developing interaction and reflection in an online learning community. Education Media International, 40(1/2), 127-237.

Moore, M. (1993). Three types of interaction. In H. Keith, J. Magnus, & K. Desmond (Eds.), Distance education: New perspectives (chap. 2). New York: Routledge.

Moore, M., & Anderson, W. (2003). Handbook of distance education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Muirhead, B. (2004). Research insights into interactivity. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 1(3), 65-70.

Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2000). Making the transition: Helping teachers to teach online. In Educause 2000: Thinking it through. (Nashville, TN, October 10-13, 2000). Retrieved April 22, 2008, from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EDU0006.pdf

Pelz, B. (2004). Three principles of effective online pedagogy. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 8(3). Retrieved March 15, 2008, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v8n3/v8n3_pelz.asp

Rourke, L., Anderson, T., Garrison, R., & Archer, W. (1999). Assessing social presence in asynchronous text-based computer conferencing. Journal of Distance Education, 14(2), 50-71. Retrieved April 19, 2008, from http://cade.icaap.org/vol14.2/rourke_et_al.html

Rovai, A. (2002). Building sense of community at a distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 3(1). Retrieved January 14, 2008, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/download/79/153

Rovai, A. (2007). Facilitating online discussions effectively. The Internet and Higher Education, 10(1), 77-88.

Schwier, R. (2001). Catalysts, emphases, and elements of virtual learning communities: Implications for research and practice. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 2(1), 5-18.

Shin, N. (2003). Transactional presence as a critical predictor of success in distance learning. Distance Education, 24(1), 69-86.

Sutton, L. (2001). The principle of vicarious interaction in computer-mediated communications. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 7(3), 223-242. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from http://www.ioe.ac.uk/ccs/dowling/cmc2004/papers/Sutton-VicariousInteraction.pdf

Swan, K. (2001). Virtual interaction: Design factors affecting student satisfaction and perceived learning in asynchronous online courses. Distance Education, 22(2), 306-331.

Swan, K. (2002). Building learning communities in online courses: the importance of interaction. Education, Communication and Information, 2(1).

Valanides, N., & Angeli, C. (2005). Learning by design as an approach for the development of science teachers’ ICT-related pedagogical content knowledge. In C. Crawford et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference. (Phoenix, AZ, USA, 2005): AACE.

Wheeler, S. (2005). Creating social presence in digital learning environments: A presence of mind? Paper presented at an the TAFE Conference, Queensland, Australia: 11 November, 2005. (Retrieved August 31, 2006, from http://videolinq.tafe.net/learning2005/papers/wheeler.pdf)

Wheeler, S. (2006). Learner support needs in online problem-based learning. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 7(2), 175–184.

Xu, Y. (2005). Creating social presence online. In B. Hoffman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational technology. Retrieved January 14, 2008, from http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/creatsp/index.htm

---

Last updated 2008-06-01 22:11:08 CST