Interactivity shouldn’t require extra steps

Yet another tab opened!

Recently, one of my colleagues told me about a conversation he had with someone supporting the deployment of digital tools at the Red Cross. The context: healthcare professionals delivering training, with Moodle LMS in place and slides as their main support. And when they are asked to add interactivity, here is what this person observes: “It’s very complicated for them to deal with this separation between what they project and the interactive tool open next to it. Having to go back to another platform to find responses and analyses is not always easy, especially for beginners.”

In other words, these trainers know what they want to teach. But simply having to juggle between their presentation and a separate tool is enough to discourage usage. What they lack is a technical environment that makes interactivity possible without additional effort (spoiler alert: they have since been informed about the PowerPoint and Wooclap integration!).

In practice, to create interactivity, these trainers would open their slide deck, then open Wooclap in another tab to create questions, and during the session switch between the two windows to guide their learners. Interactivity therefore required significant detours.

Yet while interactivity added “on top of” the material relies on individual motivation and can quickly fade, interactivity integrated “within” the material is structural and therefore encourages everyday use.

What research tells us: cognitive load and affordances

Cognitive load theory, formalized by John Sweller, distinguishes three types of load that affect working memory during a learning or design task. Intrinsic load is linked to the complexity of the content itself. Germane load refers to the cognitive effort invested in deep understanding and the construction of mental schemas. Extraneous load includes everything that does not directly contribute to learning: navigating an interface, managing complex instructions, or switching between tools.

When instructors or trainers have to navigate between multiple environments to run an interactive session, extraneous load increases. And this overload does not only affect the instructor: it also impacts learners, who must switch contexts, find a link, and understand a new interface.

A second perspective comes from the concept of affordance, as defined by Don Norman in his work on everyday object design. An affordance is what an environment suggests as a possible action. Norman distinguishes real affordance (what the tool allows) from perceived affordance (what the user believes they can do).

This leads me to believe that when designing educational technology tools, we must minimize extraneous load so that attention remains focused on the content rather than the tool.
And if an interface disrupts the workflow of a teacher or trainer, its possibilities remain invisible, whereas actions become much more accessible when integrated into already-used tools such as presentation software (this relates directly to the concept of affordance).

Blending into existing professional practices

At Wooclap, this is the logic guiding the development of our integrations. The PowerPoint and Google Slides plugins allow users to create and run questions directly within their presentations. LMS integrations enable native connections with Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard and others, so that Wooclap can be accessed from platforms teachers already use daily.

Behind these technical choices lies a pedagogical stance: the most useful tool is the one that disappears behind the act of teaching or training.

The question of integration is not only about individuals. When a university, training organization, or L&D department chooses to deploy an interactive tool, its place within the existing ecosystem is key to real adoption. Our Customer Success teams at Wooclap see this every day while supporting clients. They observe that the true cost of integration is lower when a tool can be used directly within PowerPoint, for example.

I am convinced that the most sustainable pedagogical innovation is the one that does not require teams to completely change their habits, but instead enriches what they already do. Pedagogical interactivity should, in my view, be a natural extension of the act of designing and facilitating learning. This requires a certain level of humility, both from providers like us and from institutions: accepting that the best tool is the one that does not put itself at the center.

References

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.

Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books. (Édition originale 1988)

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin.