The discourse of flexible and online learning echoes with terms such as communication, collaboration, engagement and interactivity. Of these, interactivity is frequently used to refer to an inherent quality of the medium and learning environment, with an underlying assumption that the interactive characteristics of communication with other learners or content objects is beneficial to the learni...

This study identifies two distinct conceptualizations of interactivity in the communication literature—the functional view and the contingency view. Although the functional view has predominated academic research on interactivity, this study operationalizes the contingency view in the context of an experiment designed to investigate the impression formation effects of interactivity in Web-based...

The term ‘Interactivity’ persists as both a buzzword and a fraught concept within communication theory. For 1950s information theorists (e.g. Shannon and Weaver, 1949) interactivity denoted two way communication between either humans, animals or machines, but today it has become exclusively hardwired to the telecommunications and computing sectors. The use and misuse of the term in ‘new media a...