Contact and Interactivity: Social Constructionist Pedagogy in a Video-Based, Management Writing Course

In this study of a management writing course delivered via interactive television (ITV) and video streaming (VS), we examine the impact of video-based media on the instructor's pedagogy. Using grounded theory as a methodological lens, we arrive at two core categories, contact and interactivity, and four subcategories, presence, control, dialogue, and liveliness. After a careful analysis of these categories, we claim that video-based delivery deserves attention because it represents a promising component of distance learning writing instruction. Video allows an instructor to reintroduce talking as a means of learning into the arena of distance education, which tends to be dominated by text-heavy, Web-based methods of delivery. In fact, the emergence of liveliness as a category suggests that, for distant students, active learning occurs during spontaneous discussions made possible by video components. Video-based media that complement text-based interactivity can support social constructionist pedagogy in distance learning.