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Students' attitudes toward online interaction.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This study sought to explore students' attitudes toward four types of interaction in the online learning environment: instructional, affective, collaborative, and vicarious interactions. The results indicated that students had significant differences in their attitudes toward the four types of interaction. Learners' attitudes were related to their course satisfaction, and their attitudes significantly predicted course satisfaction. The findings of this study offered some explanation of college students' attitudes toward online interaction, and should help educators better understand how to make online learning more satisfying to the students.

Introduction

While efforts have been made in the field of online learning to facilitate activities that can support higher levels of learning, the main concerns about online learning research have centered on aspects of designing effective online learning environments. Studies have shown that interaction in the online learning environment may lead to positive educational outcomes, greater retention rates (Bocchi, Eastman & Swift, 2004; Lenning & Ebbers, 1999), and increased effectiveness of distance education (Flottemesch, 2000; Kearsley, 2000; McLoughlin & Luca, 2003). Interaction is an essential element in the learning environment (Northrup, 2002) and a quality indicator in any online course (Cohen & Ellis, 2003). If the learning environment is focused on interaction, it follows that it would most likely be a learner-centered approach (Bruner, 1966) that encourages interaction between learners (Bragg, 1999).

Theoretical Framework of the Study

In spite of the widely held belief that interaction can influence the quality of online learning (Roblyer & Ekhaml, 2000), there has been relatively little empirical research investigating how online learners would view the different types of interaction. Jung, Choi, Lim, and Leem (2002) researched the students' preferences with respect to interaction, and they found that different types of interaction varied in terms of the effects on learner achievement, satisfaction, and participation in interaction. Their results demonstrated that the social interaction group outperformed the other groups (including collaborative and academic groups), and the collaborative interaction group expressed the highest level of satisfaction with their learning process. The collaborative and social interaction groups were more active in posting their opinions to the discussion board than was the academic interaction group. Given the importance of interaction in instruction, we proceeded to investigate the basic elements of interaction with regard to its function in the learning process. Four types of interaction were examined in this study: instructional, affective, collaborative, and vicarious interactions.

Instructional interaction is content-centered and tends to overlap with learner-content interaction. It is a basic type of interaction; it always occurs when the learner reads online materials, gets task-oriented feedback from the instructor or from more competent peers, or participates...

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