Work / Domain
Interactive learning experiences
Most things described as interactive are merely responsive. The system does something when you click. Whether you had to think in order to decide what to click is a separate question, and it is the only one that matters.
Why it matters
Interactivity is the easiest quality to claim and the hardest to earn. Any interface responds to input, so any interface can be described as interactive without the description being false. This makes the word almost useless as a design target, and it lets a great deal of clicking pass as engagement.
The useful distinction is about what the learner has to generate. Choosing between options that have been laid out for you is a different cognitive act from constructing an explanation, predicting an outcome, or deciding what is worth attending to. Systems that ask for the second kind produce more durable understanding, and they are considerably harder to build.
What I have come to believe
Feedback should tell you what happened, not whether you were right. A simulation that responds with the consequence of your action leaves the interpretation to you, which is where the learning is. A system that responds with a correctness verdict has done the interpreting on your behalf, and has quietly converted a reasoning task into a guessing task.
Timing matters more than richness. Immediate feedback is right when someone is building a basic skill and errors would otherwise be practised into permanence. Delayed feedback is right when someone is building judgement, because the pause forces retrieval and commitment. Systems that default to instant correction everywhere are optimising for the feeling of progress.
Struggle is often the mechanism rather than an obstacle to it. Letting learners attempt something before instruction, and get it wrong in structured ways, prepares them to understand the explanation when it comes. This is uncomfortable to design for, because a well-run version looks like failure while it is happening and only pays out afterwards.
And a system should make its own model visible. If a learner cannot form a theory about how the thing works, they will resort to trial and error, which produces a score rather than an explanation.
How I approach it
I look for the moment where the learner has to commit — a prediction, a placement, a claim they can be wrong about. If there is no such moment, the experience is a demonstration with buttons, and it should be evaluated as a demonstration.
Unsettled
What I would still argue about
The honest list. These are open in my own head, not rhetorical.
- How much guidance to remove, and when. Too little produces flailing, too much produces compliance, and the boundary appears to move with prior knowledge in ways that are hard to detect while designing.
- Whether the productive kind of struggle survives contact with assessment pressure, or whether it only works where the stakes are low enough to permit failure.
- How to tell, from interaction data alone, the difference between a learner reasoning carefully and a learner who has found an efficient exploit.