Add interactivity To Your Online Course

I want to write an article on interactivity, that is adding interactivity to your online course. This is part of the series I have been writing for Practical Update on Web Based Instruction. In my usual manner I will discuss the reasons behind what I am doing and the technology I use as much as the content of the article. I am writing this article on Google Docs thus making it available for others to read and respond to as it is being written. I have used Google Docs from an earlier time when it was called writely.com and am impressed with the quality of the online word processing program and the opportunity it provides for collaborative writing. I also would like to explore the possibility of working on the article on the iPhone when I am away from my MacBook Pro. I use Notes on the iPhone but do not find it a good system to work on an article with. Notes only works in the portrait mode and not the wider landscape mode on the iPhone. Notes can not be synched with my computer. The only way I have found to get my iPhone notes into my MacBook Pro is to mail them to myself and then convert them to a Word or Pages document. I could also paste the text into a GoogleDocs file.  I do use the mail-a-Notes-document-to-myself to paste my Notes into my iPhone blog, http://JohnsiPhoneJournal.blogspot.com.

What I now want to do is access this document and read it or add to it from the web browser on my iPhone. The browser on the iPhone has the ability to operate in the landscape mode and thus make it possible to work on the article from the iPhone. So that will entail going to http://docs.google.com logging on to my account and then going to this article. Maybe instead I should go the specific URL for this article once it is published with permissions to anyone to edit it. So let's publish this doc and see where it ends up on the internet. OK, the article is published and it is publicly viewable at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd42z4fj_6czcr25ds

It will probably be easier to go to docs.google.com and try to log in and get to the article from there (on the iPhone that is).

Here is how I would like to proceed with this article.

1. Start out with Terry Anderson's article Modes of Interaction in Distance Education: Recent Developments and Research Questions, chapter 9 in Moore, M. G., & Anderson, W. G. (2003). Handbook of Distance Education, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pages 129-144.

2. On the basis of Anderson's taxonomy, decide what types of interaction I wish to discuss in this article.

3. Start with embedding questions on the web page by looking at a recent article, The Benefits of Embedded Question Adjuncts for Low and High Structure Builders by Aimee A. Callender and Mark A. McDaniel in the Journal of Educational Psychology, May 2007, Volume 99, Number 2, pages 339-348.

4. After finishing this article, another area of online instruction I would like to explore is - Self-Regulated learning and online learning. I got tuned into this topic by an article in the March 2008 issue of American Educational Research Journal, Volume 45, Number 1, pages 166-183, Investigating Self-Regulation and Motivation: Historical Background, Methodological Developments, and Future Prospects by Barry J. Zimmerman. I did an ERIC search on self-regulated learning and online learning and identified 30 articles published from 2000-2008.

So let's get started.