Too Much Interactivity in Online Courses

The first time I heard it I was at a Sloan-C conference a few years ago. It was a small isolated study so I regarded it as a curiosity rather than a study to cause us to re-examine our online learning philosophy. Since then, I have seen it again a couple more times. Last year in the Distance Learning Report a different group of researchers reported that increased interactivity lead to decreased student satisfaction and may actually decrease a student’s chance of success in the course.

It makes sense to me that increased work places a student under increased stress to make sure the extra activities are completed in a timely fashion.

Despite the sample sizes and the program implications, I can accept the possibility of the veracity of the researchers’ claims. It makes sense that in the continuum of online learning activities there is both a point where the activities can be insufficient in number to allow the students to adequately achieve the course objectives and a point at which adding more does not mean the students learn more.

However, I am not interested in seeing more studies showing the same on either side, “those fer and those agin.” For those of you doing research I propose the following questions. Where are the lines to be drawn? Where is the “sweet spot” in the middle where it is ideal for learning, not too much but containing sufficient rigor? Is “sufficient rigor” the same for all institutions of higher learning? If not, what accounts for the differences? Who is best suitable to determine what is too much or too little, faculty, administrators, student, accrediting bodies, states, or the federal government? Is there a different point depending on discipline?

For now, I suspect that at most institutions for a sizeable percentage of institutions there is too little interactivity, especially if the institutions allow instructors to design their own content. Answering the questions above can help us to repair this problem.