Giving Learners Control through Interaction Design Stella Lee and Jon Dron Athabasca University Abstract: The design of learning environments should cater for the needs of diverse online learners and give learners control over their own learning, but it is not enough simply to provide choices: without the associated power to make informed decisions too many choices are, if anything, worse than no choice at all. Without guidance, bad choices may be made and, even when correct, the learner may be insecure about the outcomes. To be in control, the learner must be able to delegate some control to others more able to make informed decisions about a learning path. Interaction design can help the learner to make a good decision about how to proceed. This paper discusses relevant interaction design frameworks and combines them with transactional control theory and Paulsen’s laws of co-operative freedom to offer design principles for online courses that can help to put the learner in control. Outstanding issues for future development on interaction design and e-learning will also be discussed. Introduction When designing e-learning courses, it is desirable that we attempt to give learners control over their own learning. This is not a question of simply providing more choices. Although it is a prerequisite of control that more than one choice must be available, there comes a point when too many choices become overwhelming and actually reduce the learner’s level of control (Dron, 2007; Schwartz, 2004). Too little choice may result in boredom and activities that actively discourage the learner. Too much choice may lead to uncertainty, confusion and fear, again affecting motivation. Achieving the right balance will vary from circumstance to circumstance and learner to learner. Intentional choices about what to do next on a learning trajectory are sometimes made by the learner, sometimes by some other, who we will call a ‘teacher’ for the sake of brevity, but who may be the author of a book, the director of a video or any number of other decision-making roles. For a learner to be in control, it is important that he or she is the one choosing whether and when to choose, and whether and when to let the teacher make those choices. There are many ways that learners can be given control within an educational transaction. The most common approach is through dialogue. Dialogue allows learners to ask questions, express misconceptions, request changes in pace or content, provide formative evaluations, and more: essentially, to influence what a teacher does. A step away from this is to allow the teacher’s role in the dialogue to be taken by a machine. For example, a well-programmed search engine may provide answers to requests for more clarity or more detail, or a multiple-choice quiz may give feedback to the learner on what is going well and what is not. At the far end of the dialogue spectrum are systems that do not explicitly interact with learners at all: books, static websites, videos and so on. although these they may involve an internal didactic conversation, guided somewhat by authors and creators (Holmberg, 1986). It is this end of the spectrum that concerns us in this paper. Control, learning, and interaction design In this paper, we aim to highlight relevant interaction design frameworks and how they can be combined with transactional control theory (Dron, 2007) and Paulsen’s laws of co-operative freedom in e-learning (Paulsen, 2003). Anderson (2006) extends Paulsen’s Laws of Cooperative Freedom that describe a learner’s freedom to negotiate the time, the pace, the content and the media of education with the freedom to