Why include learner interactions?

Interactions in e-learning support cognitive learning, the application of behavioral psychology to teaching. Students learn a lot when they perform an action based on the information they are presented. Without exhausting the volumes written about this subject, your own background has probably prepared you for creating effective materials that support cognitive learning. To boil it down for our purposes, you present information in chunks and ask learners to demonstrate whether they have received the signal.

In the classroom, this is immortalized as a teacher presenting a lecture and asking questions, a basic educational model. In another scenario, it might be an instructor showing a student how to perform a mechanical task and then asking the student to repeat the same task.

We know from experience that learners struggle with concepts if you present too much information too rapidly without checking to see if they understand it. In e-learning, the most effective...