Blog #4 Designing for Interaction

1. How do learning designers think about interaction in online environments?

I am very impressed that new learners are engaged with learning related to innovation, problem solving and network (Barak, Watted, Haick, 2016). Therefore, interactions are very important to inspire learners to think deep and positively and solve practical problems with online tools. When designers design the assignments, they can observe or pre-survey the students first, and then guide them to learn the contents. In the next step, designers should think about the communication or discussion part, which allow students to share their ideas and get new ideas from others. Finally, a self or group reflection is a good way of interaction to impress them with the learning contents in the class.  

• How do learning designers encourage and assess interaction?

It is important for learning designers to encourage and assess interaction. I think designers should make use of some multimedia to support active learning, such as Energy 3D, Pressbooks, Discord and so on. Among all of them, I am interested in H5P most. It is convenient for teachers to develop various media content, including quizzes, presentations, games and so on. Also, there are a range of templates and teachers can customize according to students’ level and interests.

• What experiences have you had with interactivity in learning environments? How did the interaction (or lack of interaction) affect your learning? Your enjoyment?

Personally I have many great experiences with interactivity in learning environments. Last semester, I had a class about designing a mini course. I focused mainly on the traditional activities and assessment in the first draft. I designed some listening activity and vocabulary notebook assessment. However, these designs were not in a distributed or multimedia way. Therefore, I totally changed these activities and revised them in a mutual online method, including Google Form and H5P quizzes. From the valid feedback, these interaction designs are effective and improve students’ learning interests.

• How would you ensure learner-teacher, learner-content, learner-learner, and learner-interface interactions? 

Based on Vrasidas (2000), the four types of interaction are very important, including learner-teacher, learner-content, learner-learner, and learner-interface. They are fundamental processes for learning since they require students actions and responses in learning. As for learner-teacher, teachers should guide students to think, brainstorm, learn and output the knowledge they have learnt in the class. For example, after learning traditional drama skills, teachers can assign students to perform a short drama show based on the skills. As for learner-content, teachers can combine text with background music or visual videos. Visual and audio elements help arouse students’ interests in learning. As for learner-learner, teachers can provide students different interactive communities, through which students can learn actively and conveniently. As for learner-interface, teachers should keep the learning website or platform concisely and easy to click in. Students can easily click any instructive column to find anything they need, such as grades, contents and tools.

Reference

Barak, M., Watted, A., & Haick, H. (2016). Motivation to learn in massive open online courses: Examining aspects of language and social engagement. Computers & Education, 94, 49-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.11.010

Vrasidas, C. (2000). Constructivism versus objectivism: Implications for interaction, course design, and evaluation in distance education. International journal of educational telecommunications, 6(4), 339-362. https://www.vrasidas.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/continuum.pdf