2003 Annual Conference on Distance Education: Dialogues…From Promise to Practice Utah Valley State College School of Continuing Education, Orem, UT, USA February 21, 2003 IS THERE ANYONE ON THE OTHER SIDE? THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERACTION AND STRUCTURE IN WEB COURSES Jeff E. Hoyt, PhD Christopher G. Jones, PhD/CPA Lowell M. Glenn, PhD Abstract In her Conversational Framework, Diana Laurillard posits that the level of academic learning is dependent on and varies with “interactive activities.” Yet most web-based courses forgo high levels of interaction in order to achieve instructional efficiency. An earlier quantitative study of interaction levels by the authors revealed that students in characteristically low interaction on-line courses performed as well as students in the characteristically high interaction traditional courses. These results were puzzling (low interaction levels—same outcomes for grades and test scores) and seemed, at least on the surface, to refute Laurillard’s theory. To make sense of this phenomenon, the authors conducted a series of focus groups. This research presents a qualitative analysis of those group discussions as it relates to student-course, student-student, student-teacher, and student-technology interaction in online instruction. Results suggest that students compensate for the lower interaction levels in online classes with learning strategies that enable them to achieve equivalent test scores and grades. Pedagogical implications of this finding and others related to web course design are offered, with special attention given to the effect of interaction levels. Laurillard’s Conversational Framework According to Diana Laurillard (2002a), academic knowledge is a second-order phenomenon. Academic knowledge represents the teacher’s experience of the world and is often encoded in a special vocabulary and formal notations. To acquire such academic knowledge, the learner is invited to participate in a dialogue. “Through debate and discussion with the teacher, or at least vicarious experience of it in tutorials, the student can begin to see how the specialist language works, how the discourse proceeds in a particular discipline” (Laurillard, 1997, p. 172).