On Designing interaction experiences for the next generation of blended learning

Ellen D. Wagner

e live in a world where we send e-mail from our personal digital assis­tants (PDAs) and can shoot a digital movie with our mobile phone and then post it to a personal Web site while waiting at a stoplight. We have real-time on­line chats with colleagues, as well as with family and friends, in the middle of meet­ings. Global positioning services (GPS) make sure we will never be lost again. Text messaging and mobile instant messaging services raise expectations for new vari­eties of telephone and Web services alike. Presence-sensing technologies and peer-to-peer networks take the notion of the " next best thing to being there" to new levels. Connected, converged media surround us in everyday life. The vision of a world where ubiquitous, pervasive, and fully interactive access to information is available for all citizens becomes more real every day.

No vision for the future of learning is complete until we can imagine the power of converged digital and mobile technologies for education, training, and performance support. The potential reach of the mobile and personal device mar­ket alone makes it worth considering the size and range of the opportunities. Malik (2004) recently noted that the 620 million cell phones sold annually are cre­ating insatiable demand for applications and content. When also considering the more than 500 million personal computers estimated to be in use on a global basis (International Data Corporation, 2004), more than 1 billion devices have the potential to create, store, display, and distribute digital content.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

Significant opportunities currently exist for creators, publishers, distributors, and managers of digital content for industries such as news, media business pub­lishing, and education and training. With the promise of digital device ubiquity, high-quality multimedia content must also be available for mobile phones and PDAs, upping the ante on digital skills competencies in industries beyond art and design. Anecdotal evidence that only 10 percent of the world's population is currently " online" (W. Hodgins, personal communication, August 30, 2004) sug­gests that we are standing at the front edge of a significant adoption curve.

The broad extension of wireless networks continues to raise expectations for what a well-connected world should look like and what should be expected from one's personal—and business—personal communication and computing tools. Civic initiatives, such as OneCleveland (https://ramble.case.edu/its/news/ archives/000103.html), an initiative launched by Case Western Reserve Univer­sity in 2003 to provide public access to broadband wireless computer networks, are now being met by responses from other cities. For example, in June 2004, Mayor John Street of Philadelphia announced plans to make wireless access available for the entire city of Philadelphia (https://www.imakenews.com/ innovationphiladelphia/e_article000300850.cfm? x=b3vn5LM, blNyrLJC).

Clearly, with capabilities for Web conferencing and digital television, stream­ing audio and video, voice-over-IP or digital telephony emerging at the time when the world of cellular communications stands on the early curve of product ubiq­uity, it seems likely that anytime, anywhere access to information is about to be­come the norm. And when considered in the context of continually expanding use of wireless computer networks and the emergence of personal digital devices and handheld computers that provide the necessary power for successful mobile computing, the promise for fully integrated technology in the service of true life­long learning seems within reach.

What kind of demand will there be for digital content for learning? Will flexible digital content make it possible to truly personalize blended learning experiences? Will blended learning give universities and colleges the means of participating in the upcoming digital content revolution?

Digital content currently available for mobile and personal devices tends to feature online services such as news, sports, entertainment, and weather. Down­loads for tones, songs, and digital images are popular with consumers. Two very successful digital content offerings are aimed at personal entertainment, featuring music services and gaming. Mobile device users increasingly demand rich user experiences from the mobile telephone and network services providers.

So where can one find digital educational content? Federated repositories, including but certainly not limited to such initiatives as MERLOT (the Multi­media Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching; www.merlot.org),

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning 43

the ARIADNE European Knowledge Pool (https://www.ariadne-eu.org/), and EdNA, the Education Network Australia (https://www.edna.edu.au) continue to grow. Repositories formed around a shared interest encourage discipline-specific content. These repositories feature many file and form types and are created by subject matter experts for peers and students to be available by and for relevant communities of interest and practice. Publishers have created extensive collections of digital learning content to accompany textbooks and are now finding that demand is growing for content that works as a component inside a learning management system. Digital marketplaces such as Macromedia Central (https://www.macromedia.com/software/central/) also look to promote and en­able the exchange of files, applets, and applications for a range of devices including computers, PDAs, communicators, and mobile phones. And while all this activity occurs, connected communication networks continue to extend their reach and capacity, spurring future growth.

The Next Wave of Blended Learning: Education Unplugged

Welcome to a world of occasionally connected, fully interactive digital learning ex­periences. Rich Internet applications for learning take advantage of distribution media such as WiFi and cellular, ethernet and cable, and radio and television and provide rich learning content for the deployment on a variety of digital devices. Whether integrated into face-to-face, formal classes on campus or connected to on­line, self-paced learning (or some combination of both), education unplugged rep­resents an evolution of blended learning that leverages the portability and utility of notebook and tablet computers, Palms and pocket PCs, telephones, communica­tors, and IPods, enabling rich multimedia experiences in a variety of forms.

What instructional paradigm could be better suited for exploiting the potential of education unplugged than blended learning? As education unplugged comes to stand for the body of practice that takes full advantage of digital content for learning, those ever-expanding converged networks will enable rich new opportunities for personal­izing learning to emerge. Portable personal digital devices and flexible learning content represent opportunities for individualizing learning experiences by extend­ing the blended learning paradigm. Now it includes courses and modular content, including both face-to-face and online learning experiences, in whatever combina­tion makes the most sense given the audience, the context, and the criticality. Next-generation blended learning experiences, marked by the integration of mobile and personal devices, will evolve from face-to-face and online instructional blends toward a blend that also features modular content objects for personalizing, customizing, and enriching learning at times, and increasingly on terms, defined by the learner.

44 The Handbook of Blended Learning

Evolving blended learning models provide the essential methodological scaf­folding needed to effectively combine face-to-face instruction, online instruction, and arrays of content objects and assets of all form factors. For example, in such a blended learning scenario, a student may find himself participating in a face-to-face class discussion; he may men log in and complete an online mastery exercise or two, then copy some practice exercises to a PDA to take advantage of what David Metcalf (2002) calls " stolen moments for learning" —those times between classes or meetings while on the train or waiting for an appointment. Think about sending a text message with results of your practice sessions to someone in your virtual study group using your mobile phone—and getting a voice mail with feed­back on your results when you arrive at the end of your flight.

The picture gets a little more complicated as wireless Web surfing becomes the norm rather than the exception. The always-accessible information access en­abled by wireless devices literally burst open the walls of the classroom and rocks the locus of classroom control. Being able to check on facts and figures in the mid­dle of a professor-led discussion democratizes classroom dynamics in previously unimaginable ways. It means richer and more productive online tools such as auto-generating messages in your course Web site's online calendar, reminding you to post your report on the course Web site before launching your browser for class. It also means being turbo-connected, where nobody is surprised when you receive a text message from a colleague in another state, warning you that you are being blogged—while you are in the midst of delivering that very presentation on which you are being blogged.

Why Interaction Matters

The ability to interact—with instructors, students, content interfaces, features, code, channels, and environments—is analogous to being connected. For technology-mediated learning, interaction is a key value proposition. Inter­action has been and continues to be one of the most hotly debated constructs in the realms of distance learning, instructional design, and academic trans­formation, to name three. Interaction continues to be perceived as the defin­ing attribute for quality and value in online learning experience. And while interactivity (equated with interaction) is no longer as expensive, unusual, or technologically challenging as it has been even in the recent past, interaction continues to be an essential component of a technology-mediated learning de­sign success. As more and more distributed models of learning and collabo­ration emerge, interaction increasingly serves as the so-called glue that holds together all of those variables being blended. As noted by Moore and Kearsley

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended teaming

(1996), the more distributed the teaching and learning paradigm, the more critical the need for interaction.

Schools of Thought on Interaction

For the purposes of this discussion, interactions are defined as reciprocal events that require at least two objects and two actions. Interactions occur when the objects and events mutually influence one another (Wagner, 1994). A number of schools of thought have emerged in the past two decades that explore interaction in the context of technology-mediated learning. The rationale for doing so revolves around two commonly held beliefs:

• The perceived quality of a learning experience is directly proportional to and positively correlated with the degree to which that experience is seen as interactive.

• If technology-mediated learning designs are to have any significant impact on current and future pedagogical practices, then learning design and devel­opment decisions need to maximize the benefit of interaction.

The following section reviews several perspectives on interaction to com­pare and contrast aspects of each point of view. Although they are not presented in any particular chronological order, it is telling that a number of these views on interaction predate the current wave of connected personal digital tools and communication devices. Given the following discussion, a case can certainly be made for proposing a new dimension of the interaction that focuses on the interaction experience, technology mediated or otherwise.

Interactions as Transactions

For those subscribing to Michael G. Moore's views on the subject, interactions are transactions between teacher and learner, learner and learner, and learner and content (Moore, 1989). The addition of learner-interface interactions as proposed by Hillman, Willis, and Gunawardena (1994) was a nod in the direction of in­creasingly responsive computer systems and networks emerging in the early 1990s. Quests to define interaction as an expression of the relationships between and among Moore's three interaction categories have shaped much of the current un­derstanding of interaction in distance and online learning settings. In describing Moore's theory of transactional distance, Moore and Kearsley (1996) noted that transactional distance explores the relationship between structure (specifically a

The Handbook of Blended Learning

course design) and dialogue (referring to the communication between instruc­tors and learners during implementation). It focuses on shifts in understanding and perception created by the separation of teachers and learners. Moore's model considered the relationships between teachers and students (as well as learners with learners and learners with content) by examining the effect that (transac­tional) distance has on instruction and learning. This interaction schema aimed to indicate who or what was to be involved in an interaction or transaction. The agents and directions of these transactions were as important as the perceived and real distance between and among them. However, the explicit description of an interaction's purposes, intents, and outcomes was open.

While Saba and Shearer (1994) validated the relationship between dialogue and structure, later explorations by Jung (2001) added a number of dimensions to Moore's theory that responded to the evolving sophistication of content creation tools, content distribution networks, and collaboration technologies. These new dimensions include considerations related to:

Infrastructure —aimed at such issues as content expandability, content availability, and visual layout

Dialogue —aimed at such issues as academic interaction, collaborative interaction, and interpersonal interaction

Learner collaboration —aimed at issues such as the degree and quality of engagement with others

Learner autonomy —aimed at issues related to the degree and quality of learner independence

Interactions as Outcomes

I got involved (Wagner, 1994, 1997, 1999) in the interaction debate a number of years ago, originally from the perspective of an academic researcher, but later from the perspective of a working instructional designer. At that time, creating com­pelling interactive experiences was frequently the most expensive attribute of a technology-mediated learning design. Under these conditions, I found myself viewing interaction less as a theoretical construct and more as a variable that needed to be exploited, accommodated, leveraged, or managed when crafting dig­ital learning designs. From this perspective, interaction became a strategy for achieving specific learning or performance outcomes.

Between 1992 and 1999, my colleagues and I observed that the learning in­terventions, solutions, and programs we were designing for clients tended to exhibit a range of interactions that appeared as targeted outcomes. By describing these

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning 47

interaction categories to one another, we were better able to demonstrate how we were providing value from our technology-mediated learning designs:

• Interaction for participation provided learners with a means of engaging with one another. Participative interaction ranges from using names of partici­pants in discussions to articulating one's interest in assuming leadership respon­sibilities in a learning cohort.

• Interaction for communication offered the ability to share information and opin­ions or to influence intentionally the opinions or beliefs of others.

• Interaction for feedback referred to any information that allows learners to judge the quality of their performance. From a behaviorist perspective, feedback pro­vides reinforcement, which is intended to correct and direct performance. Cog-nitivists suggest that feedback provides learners with information about the correctness of a response so that they can determine if a response is right or wrong or a correct or an incorrect response, so that long-term retention of correct in­formation is enabled.

• Interaction for elaboration meant coming up with alternative examples to ex­plain a new idea or developing alternative explanations for why an idea may be framed in a particular way. It makes new information more meaningful for learn­ers. By expanding or even manipulating a bit of information associated with a given idea, it is easier to recognize all of the conceptual hooks, or points of conceptual similarity, that may be associated with that information.

• Interaction for learner control and self-regulation provided learners with the infor­mation needed to manage the depth of study, range of content covered, type of alternative media needed for information presentations, and time spent on a spe­cific learning task.

• Interaction for motivation suggested that curiosity, creativity, and higher-order thinking are stimulated by relevant, authentic learning tasks of optimal difficulty and novelty for each student.

• Interaction for negotiation involved the willingness of another individual to engage in a dialogue, come to consensus, or agree to conform to terms of an agreement.

• Interaction for team building was necessary to ensure that individual members of a team actively support the goals of the group. Interactions facilitate such de­sirable behaviors as recognition and acceptance of individual differences, expression of respect for the team as well as for its members, effective listening, a shared sense of responsibility, and confirmation of expectations within the group.

• Interaction for discovery referred to the cross-fertilization of ideas that occurs when people share their ideas and perspectives with one another in the pursuit of defining new constructs, concepts, and procedures.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

• Interaction/or exploration provided a vehicle for defining the scope, depth, and breadth of a new idea. Just as it is important to recognize a new idea, it is im­portant to distinguish a new idea from extant ideas and determine parameters within which a new idea will retain its unique identity.

• Interaction/or clarification related to the navigation of one's way through a sea of performance expectations that may or may not be clearly articulated (Wagner, 1999).

Interactions and Social Presence

As the numbers of World Wide Web users continues to climb (International Data Corporation, 2004) and as technology becomes the means of providing " next best thing to being there" experiences, the more users seek to leverage technology to establish, extend, and maintain bonds of interpersonal connect­edness. Whether establishing a framework for supporting distributed teams or establishing a link that provides deeper insight into the personological attributes of learners (Soles & Moller, 2001), the desire to transcend psychological distances and establish interpersonal connections has helped focus attention pn the no­tion of social presence, where interaction is the means of realizing that connectedness.

Social presence represents a context for evaluating interaction that focuses on taking advantage of the social and democratic features of technology (Gunawardena, 1995). It refers to the degree to which an individual feels real or is seen as real by colleagues working in an online context (Moller, 1998). Current interest in social presence reflects the current interest with real-time connected­ness, particularly when working with peer-to-peer and real-time collaborative tech­nologies. A learner who possesses a high degree of social presence is more likely to feel connected to the group, which leads to greater satisfaction and reduces the likelihood that the learner will leave the environment.

This view was reiterated by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2003) when describing social presence as the ability of learners to project themselves (their personal characteristics, socially and emotionally) as real people in a commu­nity of inquiry. Garrison and his colleagues' work had previously suggested that educational experiences intended to promote and encourage higher-order think­ing skills were most effective when embedded in a community of inquiry. Jelfs and Whitelock (2000) also explored the importance of perceptions of presence, making a variety of observations, including that audio feedback engenders a sense of presence. They noted that the ease of navigation within a virtual en­vironment has a positive impact on perceptions of presence. In all cases, inter­action, as social presence contributed to a stronger sense of identity with community, virtual or otherwise.

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning

One of the best places to see social presence in action is with peer-to-peer ap­plications such as Groove, with next-generation Web conferencing systems such as Macromedia Breeze Live, and with instant messaging programs such as Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger. All include presence-sensing features in their client applications. Consider instant messaging as an interactive social environment: members of an individual's group or " buddy list" are announced on logging in with a sound such as knocking, a ringing tele­phone, or a doorbell. Chat programs routinely provide visual indicators that a respondent is keyboarding a response. As each person logs off, the exit is marked by the sound of a closing or slamming door. When accompanied by emoticoms,.wav file recordings, photographs, and avatars, real-time chat can take on many of the same attributes of a real-time, face-to-face conversation.

Interaction as Experience

A promising new perspective on interaction considers interaction as a dimen­sion of experience. Gilmour (2003) described the phenomenon of experience in the context of what he called the " experience economy." He suggested that con­sumers increasingly desire sensation-filled experiences that engage them in a per­sonal and memorable way. In making his case, he suggested that someone who charges for the time people spend with him or her is in the experience business. Gilmour noted that consumers seek to spend less time and money on goods and services, but they do want to spend more time and money on compelling experi­ences that engage and inspire in personal and memorable ways.

A common example of a business focused on experience is Starbucks. Star­bucks has capitalized on something as simple as a cup of coffee and turned the concept of a coffee experience into a multiple-million-dollar international busi­ness success. Convincing consumers to spend $3.25 or more on a double latte may seem like a challenge, but the Starbucks experience is about much more than a simple cup of coffee. Knowing how to navigate the menu of coffee choices gives customers a sense of affiliation. Combined with comfortable chairs and tables, a (real or imagined) community gathering place, and the current addition of a reli­able wireless access point for surfing the Web, and that $3.25 seems a small price to pay for the experience.

Extending better sensory-filled experiences, particularly richly immersive online experiences, is the driving obsession of the software and Web services in­dustries. The demand for applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity in online settings. The result that comes from pushing most flat-file Web sites beyond their ability to manage their own complexities is often a frustrating, confusing,

The Handbook of Blended Learning

or disengaging user experience, resulting in dropped users, low click-through rates, lost connections, and increased costs.

The promises of enterprise-wide system integrations that marry back office infrastructure with rich presentation layers continue to push consumers toward enterprise information portals with very high expectations of good online expe­riences are hugely compelling goals. As each successive wave of client and Web server technology ups the ante on the previous generation, improvements regarding capability, integration, and responsiveness continue to come forward. Web applications have come a long way from the first hard-coded unchang­ing Web pages and CGI Web server scripts (Duhl, 2003). Taking a technological view of what it takes to enable a high-quality, interactive online experience, some of the attributes includes the following:

• It must use a ubiquitous client to maximize the audience reach.

• It must run unchanged across the Internet on multiple platforms.

• It must execute well across low- or high-bandwidth connections.

• It needs to restore processing power (not just rendering capabilities) to the client.

• It must deliver engaging user interfaces with high degrees of interactivity.

• It needs to represent processes, data configuration, sale, and feedback complexity.

• It must use audio, video images, and text in a seamless manner.

• It must support the mobile work flow by allowing users to work on and offline.

• It must allow the client to determine for itself what content or data to access and when.

• It must access multiple middle-tier services (both.NET or Java) and back-end data stores.

• It must provide a dynamic and powerful front end for the evolving Web services-based network using emerging standards such as XML and SOAP

• It must integrate with legacy applications and systems.

• It must allow the incremental addition of new functions to existing Web applications and environments to get the most out of existing Web application investments.

The model resulting from an analysis of these experience-enabling attributes was developed by Macromedia in 2003 to describe what the company then re­ferred to as " the experience layer" of rich Internet applications (see Figure 4.1). From Macromedia's perspective, the experience layer was based on the ubiqui­tous rich client framework (in this case, Macromedia Flash Player) through which the user received a rich visible experience. It also depended on a rich server

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning

environment that ensured maximum flexibility, security, efficiency, and control, linking users to enterprise resources in innovative ways to get the most value from existing IT investments.

The " Experience Received-Experience Created" dimension of this model was vaguely reminiscent of the notion of the field of experience introduced in Shannon and Schramm's communication model (Heinich, Molenda, Russell, & Smaldino, 1996) (see Figure 4.2). In the late 1940s, Claude Shannon developed a theory of communication as a mathematical model that communication schol­ars immediately applied the theory to human interaction.

In 1954 Wilbur Schramm adapted the model to deal with the concern of what he called " communication, reception, and interpretation of meaningful symbols— processes at the heart of instruction." Schramm emphasized that communication cannot occur unless the field of experiences of the sender and receiver overlap, in

The Handbook of Blended Learning

FIGURE 4.2. SHANNON SCHRAMM MODEL OF COMMUNICATION, 1954.

order to challenge and extend the knowledge of the receiver. In this case, the notion of experience referred specifically to the background knowledge likely to influence the interpretation direction or influence of a particular communication dynamic, rather than to that which a participant in a communication dynamic might posit or feel as a result of the communication. Still, the notion of improv­ing the quality of experience as the goal of an interaction offers some intriguing and compelling design possibilities.

In Support of Interaction Strategies for the Future of Blended Learning

Each of these four schools of thought about interaction provides very different views on the value that interaction brings to a learning experience. Each also shares a number of similarities:

• Each perspective is shaped by some degree of technology mediation and is look­ing for a way to transcend distance.

• Each perspective assumes some degree of self-regulation and independence on the part of the learner.

• Each perspective acknowledges the value of facilitation by an instructor, agent, or guide.

The introduction of unplugged educational experiences may have shifted the dynamics of learning design possibilities where the blended learning paradigm

On Designing Interaction Experiences for Blended Learning

may be uniquely suited for success and where interaction strategies of all kinds will be highly relevant. Interaction strategies will be the conceptual glue that will hold distributed, distant, e-learning experiences together. Interaction strategies will help monitor patterns of communication dynamics between and among agents of instructional transactions. Being able to determine the kinds of outcomes that an interaction should foster guide instructional designs, concept specifications, functional specifications, and technical specifications. They will also provide met­rics for evaluation. Interactions that promote and enable a strong sense of social presence help keep learners engaged and motivated. Keeping an eye on interaction-as-experience acknowledges the significant role played by technol­ogy mediation and the value-that rich, engaging content creation, distribution, and management tools contribute to the experience of blended learning.

Summary Thoughts

This chapter considered the impact that personal and mobile digital devices are likely to have on emerging models of blended learning. It then suggested that interaction strategies, regardless of their theoretical bases, can help improve in­dividualization, personalization, and relevancy of blended learning experiences. Finally, various models of instructional interaction were reviewed and discussed.

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PART TWO