eneral

sychology

Interactivity and Instructional Media

Interactivity refers to the degree that teaching techniques or media promote or discourage inteaction between the instructor and students.  Some instructional technologies, such as platform lectures and broadcast television, are unidirectional.  That is, the student is a passive recipient of information coming from the instructor or machine.  Trainers and educators, who wonder if students are learning anything, are experiencing a byproduct of unidirectional instruction.

The instructional media literature frequently stress the value of bidirectional communication.  Some media, for example CBT, achieve interactivity by machine to student communication.  Others, like teleconferencing media, use machines to augment person to person interactions.  Evaluations of instructional media must assess the extent of person to machine and person to person interactivity.

Assessments of the interactive capabilities of a medium must recognize that instructors and students often have different perceptions of the amount of interaction that has occurred.  Instructors typically focus on the total amount of interaction, whereas, students are primarily concerned with whether they personally interacted with the instructor.  To depict the contrasting viewpoints, consider a one hour lecture in which the instructor responds to 25 questions.  The instructor probably feels that interactivity was high.  However, if 200 students are in the class, no more than one-eighth of the class had any interchange with the instructor.  The number of interactions per student, and not the total number of interactions, is usually the most important variable.  Some media, such as classroom lectures and video teleconferencing can be highly interactive when presented to a small audience, but are virtually noninteractive when delivered to large groups.
 
 

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