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.

Where Are the Faculty Leaders for Digital Humanities?

A colleague recently sent me a link to a New York Times article, Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches by Patricia Cohen.


In the article Cohen describes how the new world of data is leading to studies and research in the world of humanities that just were not possible in the past such digitally mapping Civil War battlefields to determine topography‘s role or “using databases of thousands of jam sessions to track how musical collaborations influenced jazz”.

The article is not a list of hitherto unquantifiable potentialities; it asks the question of purpose and value of the information being obtained.

The article is yet further reinforcement that even technophobic or techno-agnostic educators must shift their positions to provide guidance to our digital native students. Even though technology is not their field, this means that educators must continually educate themselves in the both what kinds of technology are available to their students and how to use them. It means that my colleagues can ill afford to spend their time only on their disciplines but must now consider technology usage to be as much a part of their disciplines as is using the library. It means that technology, particularly office and web 2.0 applications, must play a role in classroom sessions.

Another colleague once told me that technology tools are best when they work right and remain in the background. Cohen’s article helps to show that viewing technology through this lens may be shortchanging our students regardless the discipline.

Rubrics & the Fudge Factor

Rubrics ensure fairness in grading the work of students. I was talking to a colleague once who did not want to use a rubric because it did not allow her to use the “fudge factor,” assigning a grade based on what you know—or feel you know—about a student rather than wholly upon the student’s actual performance. She thought the “fudge factor” was an equalizer helping to ensure students got what they deserved not just what they earned. I was horrified and took it as my mission to help her understand how not using the rubric was innately unfair to the majority of her students in a class in which the essay was the major method of assessment. With a diverse student body, many kinds of biases could creep ever so quietly and unknowingly into the grading process. Ethnicities, language, social status, styles of clothing, hairstyles, etiquette standards or lack thereof…and just the good old fashioned disdain much of the young have for older adults and authoritative types mean that, despite how hard you try, the way you see the student (in a ground class) plays into their score, in mostly subtle but perhaps sometimes in very large unconscious ways...even online. The fudge factor works against us by allowing us to reinforce subconscious biases. The only way to manage our own subconscious skewing is to use rubrics.

What Goes into a Hybrid Course

Hybrid courses, which are also called blended courses, present many advantages to both the institution and to the students. In a hybrid course some time on the physical campus is replaced by time in the learning management system. At my institution it usually works out to be a 50-50 arrangement. The institution gains valuable classroom space to deal with a burgeoning student population. Students love the apparent reduced time in a classroom seat.

However, a conversation that I have had many times with my colleagues is that reduced time on the physical campus should not equate to reduced overall learning time. The online portion of the class is not equal to homework. The online portion of the class should include real learning. There should be—and this is not an all-inclusive list—activities, discussions, interactive exercises, group work, etc. Online students should expect multimedia, announcements, and feedback.

For students, real learning is not just reading from the text or from the web, nor is it simply posting an answer to an assignment, nor is it taking an online quiz, exam or other assessment. The online portion of the class should be as dynamic and lively as the on-ground portion. In other words, the online portion of a class should be a class.

If all you need is static, one-way content, if all you need is to post homework, then I would assert that a hybrid course is not what you need. Keep the students in class for the full number of credit hours and supplement those hours with the online support materials you would like.