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Transactional Distance among Open University Students: How Does it Affect the Learning Process? : European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning
Interesting study looking into transactional distance between online learners at a Greek open university, with some great qualitative findings.
The findings are very revealing about the role and nature of dialogue in online learning at the authors' university. As we noted in our book, Teaching Crowds, transactional distance becomes very complex once there are multiple 'teachers' (or teaching presences) involved, where peer and content interactions are multi-dimensional and so transactional distance shifts and varies all the time. The study reveals some quite nuanced and differentiated communication patterns that demonstrate this quite nicely. A bit of fuzziness shows through, however, where what is reported is mainly levels of communication rather than perceived transactional distance. The two are very closely related, inasmuch as communication is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reducing transactional distance, but they are not the same thing.
I find it hard to imagine, as suggested for future study in the conclusion, what ways one might measure transactional distance in learner-content or learner-interface interactions that would not make the distance extraordinarily high. This is almost true by definition, apart from in 'creepy' ways (e.g. if the learners felt psychological closeness and attachment with an AI) or, maybe stretching the definition a bit, through guided didactic conversation. I will be interested to see how the writers address this!
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Jon Dron
Jon Dron
Comments
Jon, I like the distinction between amount of interaction and the perception of transactional distance, but I think taking that abit further, the ideas of "gudied transactional conversation" is not creepy at all, but engagement of interaction with content. Certainly watching video, reading a great book or being engaged in a game ( Csikszentmihalyi's flow) are ways of descreasing transacational distance. Moore (writing when he did in the late 1980's) I don't think experienced the type of engagement that media rich content interaction can produce, and thus suggested that only "dialogue" was the recipe for reducing transactional distance.
Interesting - I'm not sure that it is entirely correct to equate interaction with dialogue, though I quite like it as a metaphor. Indeed, I often describe the process of building technologies as a kind of conversation with the tools and materials, which are typically mediating artefacts between us and one or (usually far) more others, so it would be inconsistent of me to suggest otherwise. When using a doorknob, for example, we are seldom aware of being in a dialogue with its designer and maker, though it can be useful to think of it that way, despite there being no direct interaction that the creators would even be aware of. But it is much more a 'dialogue' with the doorknob itself.
On reflection, I think I agree with you re flow and engagement, at least up to a point: if transactional distance is a psychological and communications gulf as Moore suggests, then I can see how the psychological gulf might be reduced in even basic textbooks that are engaging and that give a sense of the person behind them - in such circumstances we might begin to get inside the head of another, to think a little like they do or, rather, to model their ways of thinking - that's often the value of being taught as opposed to self-guiding our own learning. But the communications gulf would still seem to be a yawning chasm, at least when compared with a situation where the author can talk back. It would be instructive to think of this in a rich game context, where interactions with the AI (the ghost of the designer, perhaps, reified interaction as well as content) are, subjectively, qualitatively different from those with other human players. In our book we cited a couple of bits of very clear evidence of this, including evidence drawn from brain scans of people who believed they were playing against a computer compared with those who thought they were interacting with a machine. As the example showed, we can be fooled, sometimes, but there is something much more meaningful and very different involved when we know (or believe) that we are playing with real people. And I think that meaningfulness is what comes from, and at least partially defines, lower transactional distance. And that's also why it might be a bit creepy if we felt that meaningful attachment without an actual person being on the other side.