The Role and Potential of Interaction in E-Learning

Abstract

Interaction is widely accepted as essential to learning. The main challenge in distance education is to overcome the transactional distance by providing opportunities for interaction. Understanding the role of interaction in learning and how learning environments can be designed to allow for different forms of interaction is important for effective application of emerging technologies in education. The purpose of this paper is to draw conclusions about the importance of interaction in distant learning. It briefly reviews different types of interaction that have been proposed for distance education and examines the importance of evaluating distance learning environments designed for interactive learning. While we are not able to ascertain which type of interaction is the most important in distance education, it is the aim of this paper to provide more insights into this issue.

Keywords: distance education, interaction types, design of interaction-learning.