Sharing what I learned: Online Interaction

Last week I participated in a week-long online discussion called “Real” Ways to Promote Interaction for Effective Online Learning. It was offered through the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an elective in the Distance Education Certificate Program I am taking. It was a nice week of discussion and sharing among educators and instructional technologists and designers from around the world. I want to share some resources, ideas and thoughts I gained from the week.

One is that I think the best example of interaction was this online course itself. I like how it was not built around a textbook or on-line lecture. Brief articles (article 1 [PDF], article 2 [PDF]) were used as advance organizers to suggest a common analytical framework (See Fig.1) The course was built around discussion and all of us, our facilitators included, were teachers and learners. We sharedcritiqueded, and brainstormed about real life experiences and applications of educational technology.

We used Moodle, the open source LMS, to organize the course. While I saw only a small bit of what Moodle can do, and our faciliators may have designed a unique environment, it appeared to be based on a very different paradigm than Blackboard. Our learning environment was built on discussion. And the opportunity to build wikis while in the course allowed us to collectively build and share our knowledge.

This particular online experience "worked" because we all shared a deep level of experience and motivation for the subject matter. This has me wondering if and how this can be recreated for all the students we serve either as teachers or instructional designers. I think this level of interaction in a learning experience is something we should be preparing our students for. I think we have to look at our courses and institutions and consider how we build students' capacity to engage at a deep level as they progress through each course as well as through their program -- degree, certificate, or whatever they are pursuing.

This short course provided many ideas and strategies to build that capacity. The facilitators provided a web site with many examples of interaction for us to evaluate and comment upon. Then participants shared their own. An idea that stuck with me is the use of storytelling as a teaching tool. I was really engaged and moved by these examples. (Here are the three: Family Violence, School Leadership, Church Leadership)They remeinded me that we humans respond to stories and make sense of the world through stories. Stories engage our "whole person," our emotional and spiritual along with our thinking selves. Whether delivered via text, audio or video, hearing and sharing stories engages us at a deep level.

I was glad that my suggestion of adding the fourth dimension of interacting with experts seemed to resonate with other participants. I would like to see a discussion series some time on that very issue. I think we are moving into an era in which being a "subject matter expert" will be a greater challenge as the production and dissemination of knowledge increases dramatically. We all will need the skill of finding, evaluating and engaging others' expertise.

I was struck by how much concern there was about the ability, or inability, to navigate the discussion threads as some desired. The discussion board did become a bit unwieldy as threads grew to as many as 85 comments. It has me wondering what could have been done to make this process easier. Could the facilitators have devised and recommended a different set of posting conventions that would have made this easier to navigate? Could students have the "power" tinitiatete threads rather than simply respond? I can't answer this because I do not know how Moodle works at the admin level. The experience reminds me of how some faculty allow the default settings in Blackboard to dictate the design of their course. We can't let the machine organize our thinking.

I also read several comments about the need to "keep it simple" and not let technology be an impediment. While I generally agree, I also think that in addition to teaching subject matter we are also teaching ICT literacy. And because technology evolves rapidly, we will always be doing this. We need to feel confident we can make the best teaching and learning choices possible without concern for technology. To accomplish this, our institutions must make sure we have easily accessible technical support for the teacher and the learner. We also need to be active in promotinig public policy decisions that bridge the ICT knowledge gap in our communities.

Lastly, I still have the same question I posed at the very start of the class. Is interaction with a machine really interaction? I guess this is a philosophical question that may or may not have relevance for instructional design. I do worry about how language can become corrupted by ideology. If "interaction" once referred to meaningful human enagement, and no such comparable engagement can occur (yet) between human and machine, have we diminished what we mean by interaction?

I would like to hear from others on how they design and balance interaction in their courses.

Technorati Tags: online learning, University of Wisconsin, Moodle, interaction, Columbus State, storytelling