Metrics for Interactivity

Abstract

A study of the properties of virtual laboratories to design interactivity metrics for an engineering digital library are described. An Interactive Checklist to help select the best resources for educational context and describe them objectively is demonstrated. Virtual laboratories are one important genre of interactive multimedia objects. Interactivities are complex objects and new digital genres or forms, with no print equivalent. A prototypical example of an interactive is the 3-d simulation virtual laboratory in GROW (Budhu & Coleman, 2002). This type of virtual laboratory provides links to prerequisite material, supplementary readings, uses multimedia formats, and different types of user interaction to motivate, engage, challenge, facilitate, and test learning. It has conceptual and physical components that can be objectively identified on which metrics for interactivity can be developed. Interactivity type and interactivity level are elements for resource description in educational metadata frameworks such as the IEEE LOM (2004). However, interactivity is hard to describe in a way that is useful as an access point or for making relevancy choices about resources in educational tasks such as teaching and learning and hence the need for objective measures. The currently available vocabularies for interactivity type are inadequate and include: active, expositive, mixed, and undefined. Similarly the values for interactivity level are equally limited and ambiguous: very low, low, medium, high, very high. The Interactive Checklist, tested with GROW, allows the metadata creator and the collection developer to easily and quantitatively measure interactivity and assign the corresponding level to learning resources of all types.