Interactions and activities
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
The interactions and activities of a learning experience are the things that people actually do (i.e., actions) during the experience.
Definition
An action is any verb that is performed by a person during a learning experience.
An interaction is an action that is performed by someone specifically with another person, a computer, or media.
A learning activity is a group of actions and interactions that are performed by participants for the purposes of learning. Learning activities are designed to have the participant perform specific actions and interactions that are expected to improve their learning outcomes. Activities often specify the actions that participants should perform in the activity and provide directions on how they should interact with each other, the teacher, computer software and devices, and informational media.
Additional Information
Instructional designers need to include a variety of activities for people to do within an educational product or experience. It is through action, or activity, that a learner comes to acquire new information and gain mastery with new skills. Knowledge just doesn't come to people: they instead must do some kind of action to gain that knowledge. For instance, even if a person reads a book or Wikipedia to learn new things, that person must still do the act of reading to acquire that knowledge. For skills and procedures, learning involves actually performing that skill or procedure. For learning new knowledge and knowing how to use it, information must be acquired and memorized, but also practiced with and applied in various contexts - all of which are activities for the person to perform.
Learning activities are the sets of actions and interactions that people do to learn. In even simpler terms, learning activities are the things that people actually do to learn new knowledge, skills, and dispositions. At their core, learning activities are the types and sequences of verbs that are peformed by people as they participate within a learning experience.
The instructional design team should be attentive to whether the learning activities that are designed for an educational experience align with the intended learning objectives. Each type of activity elicits certain actions from both participants and teachers. Instructional designers should therefore create and select learning activities during the design phase that align with the intended learning objectives. With the intended learning objectives in mind, activities should allow the learner to (1) be exposed to information and knowledge about the learning objectives; (2) observe tasks being performed that use the skills and knowledge in the learning objectives, ideally in authentic settings; (3) practice using knowledge and skills in a sustained way, with feedback on performance if possible; and (4) have a chance to use their own interests, motivations, and goals to make the content more relevant to them.
Sustained participation through activities is an important principle of the commitment to active learning
Types of interactions that occur within educational contexts
In addition to the above list of types of activities that are commonly used in educational products, there are specific types of interactions that are commonly seen in educational products. Each interaction has different expectations by the participant and some may be more appropriate for achieving the intended learning objectives than others.
Participant-media interactions. Participant-media interactions are those where a participant interacts with an informational source. This includes books, web articles, videos, podcasts, audio, websites, and the like. Media use is typically a static interaction: the participant interacts with it but the content remains the same. However, with digital technologies, dual interactions can be possible where the media can interact back with the participant and changes its content, such as in branching narratives, interactive hyptertext websites, and change the playback of video content based on choices from the participant.
Participant-teacher interactions. Participant-teacher interactions are those that occur when a participant interacts with a teacher or facilitator for assistance, help, or guidance - or a teacher interacts with a participant to perform an instructional task, provide feedback, or to provide help when the teacher identifies that it is needed. Interactions between a participant and a teacher can be sustained over time in a back-and-forth way, or it can be short term.
Participant-participant interactions. Also known as peer interactions, participant-participant interactions are when participants interact with each other in learning activities. This collaborative and communicative interaction between peers is a key component of social learning theories, which seeks to maximize the benefits of people interacting with each other to gain a deeper understanding about complex concepts and skills. Interactions can be sustained over time, such as discussions, collaboration on projects or work, sharing, research, feedback, or other learning activities. The strength of a peer-to-peer interaction is that it can continue indefinitely provided that the work and activites remain engaging and relevant to participants.
Participant-computer interactions. Although a human is not involved on the other end of the interaction, participant-computer interactions are an essential components of today's educational landscape. Participant-computer interactions are when a person interacts with a device, computer system, or software (usually via an interface), and that the computer system interacts back. Because computer systems and software have become highly interactive, it is important to consider how a person interacts with computer systems, interfaces, and devices when performing educational activities. This form of computer interaction is also called human-computer interaction in some research disciplines.
List of common educational activities and interactions
Although this list is not complete, it represents many of the commonly seen educational activities that are included within educational products and experiences for people to actually do. Instead of listing specific actions or activities (such as reading a book or having an online discussion with other students), this list represents unique types of activities that can help people learn in different ways by performing engaging actions.
- Using information and media (e.g., reading text, watching video, listening to audio, visiting websites)
- Researching and discovering useful information
- Observing and experiencing, such as through demonstrations, models, worked examples, and how experts perform tasks
- Memorizing information, facts, and content
- Writing, documenting, and describing
- Producing media
- Storytelling and creating narratives
- Practicing skills or reciting knowledge, such as drills
- Imitating, copying, or mimicking tasks or skills, or following procedures and models
- Exploring, testing, and experimenting
- Analyzing, comparing, contrasting, evaluating information or arguments
- Reasoning and using argumentation (forming and evaluating arguments)
- Asking questions (also often called inquiry skills)
- Decision making
- Problem solving and critical thinking
- Reflection, self-analysis, and deriving insights from experiences
- Playing and playful actions
- Role playing and perspective taking
- Creating, making, designing, developing
- Brainstorming and idea generation
- Expressing ideas and onesself and artistically representing concepts
- Discussing, describing, and defining ideas or concepts in a group setting
- Communicating with other participants, teachers, and experts, and community members
- Collaborating with other participants, teachers, experts, and community members
- Planning and goal setting (also called metacognition and self-regulated learning skills)
- Immersive sensory perception / exploring virtual or augmented reality spaces
- Taking tests and assessments / participating in evaluations
- Receiving, providing, and processing feedback
- Soliciting and interpreting multiple perspectives and ideas to understand complex topics
- Seeking help and support
- Confronting and working with emotions
- Developing identity and positive dispositions
- Instructional activities performed by teachers and technologies
Tips and Tricks
- Every educational product is defined by its unique collection of activities and features that people actually do while they participate with the product. Using your intended learning objectives as a guide, consider what types of activities might be useful from the list above and what specifically you will have your participants do.
- Don't just choose learning activities arbitrarily, or because they are popular right now, or because they look cool. The activities in an educational product must align with the learning objectives and give people memorable experiences with what goals you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to teach concepts, the activities must expose people to the content and ideas, but also require them to practice using and applying the content knowledge in different ways. Thus, you must argue for and justify why you think that each activity and interaction that you choose will achieve the desired learning objectives, and not just pick learning activities at random. Every action and interaction gives people a different type of experience that exposes them to new content, ideas, and skills. What activities you choose will matter in how people learn about, use, and gain mastery with the content and skills that the educational product seeks to develop.
- Learning activities are composed of both actions (i.e., things an individual does by themselves) and interactions (i.e., things an individual does with other things and people). Consider the different types of interactions that are possible within an educational product: participant-media, participant-teacher, participant-participant, and participant-computer. Each of these interactions gives learners different experiences and opportunities for achieving learning objectives. How might you achieve your
- The list of activities provided above is just a list of general common activity types. It is not comprehensive and does not include specifically what people should do and how they should do it. For each activity that you choose for your product, a comprehensive set of instructions or directions for how people should perform the activity should be documented so that people perform tasks in the ways that are expected and intended by the designer to achieve the learning objectives.
- Evaluation and assessment activities are used to investigate whether the learning activities and design features of an educational product actually work as expected and promote learning. This serves to also test whether there is an alignment or link between the learning objectives and the activity choices in the design. If the evaluation reveals that there was little to no effect, or that people did not participate as expected with the activities, designers should consider revising their products and looking deeper into how and why the activities were expected to lead to learning outcome achievement but did not achieve these goals. Such instances are not necessarily failures, but do provide ample information on how to improve the product so that the activities better capture the types of actions and interactions that are necessary to promote learning for participants.
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