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"Has the online course creation market gone stale already? Launched on Tuesday, newcomer Versal hopes to breathe life and possibilities into what they see as a very limited set of tools that currently exist. Their course-building platform offers a set of pre-made gadgets that allow teachers to build interactive courses on their platform through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag and drop interface. To add interactivity beyond basic pictures, texts and embedded quizzes, Versal uses gadgets to create interactive graphs, simulations, and models. With these gadgets, teachers can build models or simulations that the students use to experience and manipulate the content they are learning."

Under the supervision of the instructor - there's the rub. I don't mean a kind of aloof, checking-your-Facebook-while-students-work kind of "supervision" but rather the kind of interactive engagement that a coach might have with his or her players while they practice. The coach doesn't do the exercises for the players, but neither does s/he stand off to the side and let them flail around the entire time. There is interaction between the coach and the player, between different players, and between different groups of players. And through that interaction, questions get answered, others get raised - and things get learned, if it's done right.

"hat we're witnessing is the changing role of faculty in Competency Based Education - I (and many ed. reformers) believe instructors SHOULD function more like tutors, coaches, and mentors than their roles have traditionally called for! The faculty role has been historically constructed as a "fount of knowledge", sage on a stage, the smartest person in the room - this was a historic necessity during the long era of information scarcity that we are transitioning away from. Now that information is abundant, infinitely reproducible, instantly accessible, subject matter experts need to share space with faculty who specialize in the interpersonal nuances of teaching students. In fact "regular and substantive interaction" is scarce in higher education, unless you count lecturing and note-taking as "interaction". Do you? Is this the standard that OIG is measuring WGU against?"

YouTube videos may soon be getting a little more interactive. There's now a page on the YouTube website describing a feature called "Video Questions Editor Beta," which was spotted by the Dutch tech site WebSonic.nl. The page itself is pretty bare-bones, but it describes the feature as a way for "multiple questions to be displayed on top of your video during playback that a viewer can answer." So video producers can add an interactive element to their content - imagine adding little quizzes to an educational video or introducing product questions to a video ad.

inklewriter is a free online tool that lets you create your own interactive story. Rather than creating a contrived example, click here to try a real story! In this case, "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"

"Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them. Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things."

"The bottom line is that there really is no replacement for face-to-face interaction between academics and students. Digital and online methods can enrich those interactions, but it seems unlikely they can replace them in anything other than a greatly impoverished way without the investment of considerable resources. No wonder 72% of those who have taught moocs over the past three years believe students who took their classes had not done sufficient work to deserve credit from their institution."

"ARIS is a user-friendly, open-source platform for creating and playing mobile games, tours and interactive stories. Using GPS and QR Codes, ARIS players experience a hybrid world of virtual interactive characters, items, and media placed in physical space."

"When you combine IdeaPaint's ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote's ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become a more creative and engaging place to learn."

Some of these lateral interactions are what we would call social relationships. They are outside the official hierarchy. As Verna Allee has noted, for complex environments, or "un order", we need stronger networks and looser hierarchies. Or you could say that we need more lateral interactions.

"What we're really trying to do is enable a new kind of interaction with Google where it's more like how you interact with a normal person," says Huffman. To illustrate, he picks up his smartphone and says "How far is it from here to Hearst Castle?"

Google today announced the launch of Web Designer, a new tool for building interactive HTML5 sites and ads. The company first hinted at this launch in June, but had been quiet about it ever since. Web Designer, which Google calls a "professional-quality design tool," is now officially in public beta and available for download for Mac and Windows.

"As Victor begins to lose he gets sarcastic and angry but otherwise he just makes conversation - commenting on words he puts down and generally chattering away while you play. Like the fitness robot, Autom, the designers made Victor so that he would be easily to engage with. By simulating human interaction, you get a unique experience that can make people feel a little better. Plus it's a trash-talking Scrabble-bot. Are we living in the future or what?"

"Contrary to a progressive lens of technology where asynchronous patterns replace older asynchronous patterns, I like to think that the big picture here is that the gathering collection of asynchronous technology over time - with all of its varieties of communication frequency and durability - gives humans more choice and autonomy over how we interact and what we interact about. Radio has not been replaced by television or even podcasts, but only declined in popularity and taken its place among what is now available. An abundance of asynchronous options is not really a shift that we have been experiencing, but liberation from a narrow range of vastly different options."

"What do students want in the learning activities for their online STEM courses? They'd prefer more real-life problems to solve and instructional resources such as simulations, case studies, videos and demonstrations. They'd also like the chance to meet and collaborate with other students as well as teaching assistants online. Finally, they'd appreciate clear and consistent information from instructors about instructions, assignments, assessments, due dates, course pages and office hours. What do students currently get? The most common course activities are the completion of major projects or assignments, reading, visiting websites, taking quizzes or exams, and viewing slideshows. The most interaction they report experiencing comes from reading course news and announcements and receiving e-mails from the instructor."

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"we will walk you through the features of some of the interactive video tools that can take learning experience to a different level. Also we have included, at the end, a feature comparison table for the various tools."

"Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements, in Pictures and Words"

"They usually want some magic metric, some formula like, "two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization." It doesn't work that way. A great deal depends on how the worker chooses to spend that time in social channels, how well he filters and curates information, how she chooses the people with whom she's interacting. "

The professional iPad interactive whiteboard and screencast recorder with sophisticated tools for hand-drawn graphics and remote desktop control. Learn more