Using Marshall McLuhan's classic distinction between "hot" and "cool" media can make the problem of interactivity clearer. In Understanding the Media (1964), McLuhan explained that "a hot medium is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of being well filled with data." A cool medium, by contrast, is one in which "little is given and so much has to be filled in." McLuhan was primarily interested in the media itself, and had little to say about that process of "filling in" -- what today we would call interactivity. And he was limited by his experience of technology in the post-war years, especially that of the low-budget, black-and-white television shows he rated as "cool" because they left so much more to the imagination than did a film. Thirty-five years later, television has become both "hotter" and more complex, with its sophisticated remote controllers, multitude of channels and sources, and variety of reception options. Today, if we think of watching television only as a simple-and, at times, simple-minded-process, we fail to appreciate the isolation of the viewer from this "hot" medium that supplies sensory data to the exclusion of that individual's imagination or reaction. Indeed, channel-surfing, which increases the supply of sensory data while numbing the viewer's responses to it, makes clear that an experience conducive to learning may be directly related neither to the level of activity nor to the level of information.

Learning is "cool" as a measure of the individual's involvement in the medium. We can easily recognize the difference between the "hot" vacuity of channel-surfing and the "cool" absorption and involvement of learning. The challenge to educators, then, is not only to produce a "cool" digital medium in which learning can take place, but to do so despite use of a screen that may remind students of television and the uninvolved behavior patterns it induces. The key to success in this challenge is interactivity-the activity of "filling in" the knowledge presented in the medium.

Whereas the content of critical thinking supports the construction of graduated, interactive exercises, there needs to be a variety of integrated interactive elements in any successful online education project. Like Caesar's Gaul, these strategies for interactivity can be divided into three parts: passive, hyperlinked, and interpersonal.

Passive Interactivity

"Passive interactivity" need not be a contradiction in terms, because one of the problems with digital instruction is the loss of context-both physical and psychological-that a classroom setting provides. To compensate for this, online courses need to create a visual "focus" for the lesson at hand, a referential map of where the student has been, and where he or she is headed, to provide a context for where he or she is now. Such a context empowers a student to relate the subject matter of an individual lesson to the larger scope of the course. Passively interactive page designs are thus "interactive" because the visual mapping succeeds by making the student actively aware of its import and by backgrounding a context for the current lesson as a result; but this is a design feature only, requiring no physical activity on the part of the "passive" student.

"Passive interactivity" is a good reminder for instructor-designers. No classroom educator would make the assumption that all learning has a physical component to it-indeed, much classroom behavior (squirming, talking, eating, or almost anything other than paying attention, taking notes, or asking questions and making responses) tends to be incidental to or distracting from the learning supposed to be taking place. Instructors as well as students should be pleased that some of these distractions have been reduced or eliminated in online education, but the absence of conventional classroom interaction sometimes prompts design elements that unwittingly introduce greater distractions, including animated gifs, scrolling messages, unnecessary hyperlinks, and a whole range of other sorts of computerized "busy work."

Not all links are unnecessary, of course, and the "hypertext" half of HTML provides much of the educational power of online learning. But designers should recognize that, in porting the educational experience from classroom to computer, a new (and not always efficient or beneficial) level of activity is created: the navigational. Though students should always be aware of how to exit the lesson or repeat a part of it, time spent making many other navigational choices is time lost to learning. An operation as basic as scrolling can become extremely confusing if it conflates, either on the screen or in the user's mind, two non-complementary elements meant to be kept separate. As a result, while a wide variety of contextual links may be helpful in creating a passively interactive background, the foreground-the lesson itself-should be free of extraneous links and concentrate not on navigation, but on learning.

Hyperlinked Interactivity

The key to asynchronous online learning is "hyperlinked interactivity," a native feature of HTML, which makes possible the creation of multiple choice questions, expert systems, and other such branching-informational models. Branching models approximate the way we work through problems and, while books can utilize limited branching schemes in a clumsy way, only since the advent of the computer have sufficiently complex and speedy branching applications been available. If the questions and answers are cleverly written (especially the "wrong" answers and their explanations, in the case of multiple-choice format), branching asynchronous models offer the student immediate and individual instruction via correction and reinforcement-something that conventional classroom instruction cannot hope to achieve. Universal interaction with students, combined with accessibility at the student's convenience, exact repeatability, and uniform quality, gives asynchronous online learning the potential, in suitable situations, of not merely replacing, but surpassing the classroom learning experience.

Multiple-choice branching models are an effective instructional tool, and should be kept separate in the instructor's mind from quizzes and tests, that may or may not make use of a multiple-choice format. Effective learning will not take place in an environment where all activities are somehow recorded and reported. And, though the interactive nature of online education makes possible greater measurement and assessment of student progress than can be undertaken in a conventional classroom, over-zealousness in this area will have a chilling effect on student learning. Students should be encouraged to use this technology to explore their own understanding by repeated access to questions, exercises, and quizzes, without the fear that such experimentation will affect their grades in the course.

Integration is another issue of importance for online course design. Because hyperlinked interactivity is the central avenue for immediate positive and negative reinforcement in an asynchronous learning model, it is important that such links be fully integrated into the instructional materials. Too many online courses, especially those produced through various "course creation" software packages, keeping interactive and instructional pages separate, occasioning counterproductive delays and navigational barriers in the learning process. Though there is certainly a place for the delayed interactivity of stand-alone exercises, reviews, and quizzes, an initial round of interactive asynchronous learning should be integrated into all instructional texts.

Interpersonal Interactivity

Even asynchronous projects can benefit from the variety of communication options now available on the Internet, including e-mail, listservs, chatrooms, and bulletin boards. Such communication can roughly be grouped under the heading of "interpersonal interactivity," and helps to reproduce online some of the advantages of collaborative peer learning in the classroom. When utilized effectively, such communication can give a student more direct and more convenient access to the instructor and other students, and can make student contributions more formal, thoughtful, and precise. However, use of these technologies also carries some warnings.

First, the new ease of student access to the instructor can mean very time-consuming exchanges because a higher percentage of students may send e-mail queries and comments than ask them verbally in class or out; classroom instructors who promote e-mail exchanges with their students may find this true as well. This is clearly a boon to student learning and therefore not to be discouraged; instructors can mitigate the time demands by posting lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) online, and pointing students to the appropriate response.

Second, unmediated student contributions to listservs, chatrooms, and bulletin boards can be filled with misleading or erroneous ideas and impressions -- no more so than verbal in-class contributions to small-group discussions, certainly, but the written nature of most Web communications may give them an unwarranted sense of greater authority for some students. Mediation by the instructor may prove both time-consuming and counterproductive, carrying as it would a sense of censorship. One solution might be occasional responses by the instructor, summarizing what was and was not valuable in recent student postings.

All learning is a function of interaction. In taking courses onto the Internet, instructors have an opportunity to script levels of interactivity in ways unavailable in the conventional classroom. To do so, however, requires rethinking online interactivities, not as a means of assessment and grading, but as the primary way to involve students and make learning "cool."

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