I went to a webinar last week with my glasses on and coffee ready.

That detail matters, because it tells you exactly where my head was.
I’d read the post advertising it. The facilitator was talked up, the topic was one I care about, and I really felt it was going to be useful and interesting.
So I logged on early, cosy at my desk with my coffee, and felt I was ready to connect with the topic and with the people who’d shown up for it.

And then, slowly, I deflated.

It was just someone reading slides.

That was the whole event.

To be honest, it could have been a YouTube video (and not a good one, an out-of-date one) except that I’d blocked out an hour and put on a decent shirt for it.

I sat there watching the webinar, doing that thing where you calculate how long you have to stay before leaving counts as rude.

I do feel bad saying all this. The person presenting almost certainly knew their stuff. Somewhere underneath those slides there was real expertise and probably real passion, but none of it made it across.
I do feel that in this day and age, with the volume of resources available to help us design a decent session, I think we need to step up. And I wanted that expert to bring out what they know. I wanted to feel it.

The problem wasn’t that it was bad

Here’s what I keep coming back to. It wasn’t a badly run session, exactly. Nothing went wrong.
The tech worked, the slides advanced, the hour finished on time.

The problem is that I was promised one thing and given another, and we don’t have good enough language to describe the difference. I was told the session would be engaging. What I was actually given was admission.

I’d been let into the room. That’s it. That’s what I got.

Three words we keep using as if they’re one

There’s a model from media research I’ve been thinking about, from Nico Carpentier, and it has been quietly surfacing for me in how I look at learning design. He splits what we lazily call “engagement” into three separate things: access, interaction, and participation. They’re not synonyms, but more a ladder.

Access is being let in.
The link works, the content is there, you can see and hear it. You are present.

Interaction is a genuine exchange.
Something goes out from you and something comes back that is shaped by what you sent. You affect it, and it affects you.

Participation is having a say in what happens.
Not just responding to the thing, but influencing what the thing is.

And here’s the part that got me. Carpentier’s model doesn’t come from education at all. It comes from research into media and democracy, where participation has a very specific meaning: sharing actual decision-making power. Not being consulted. Not being invited to give feedback that gets noted and filed. Having a genuine hand on the wheel.

Once you’ve seen those three as separate rungs, you can’t unsee how often we deliver ‘access’ and describe it as ‘participation’.

Where most of our “interactive” features actually sit

This is uncomfortable, so let’s do it quickly.

Click-to-reveal is access. You’re being shown information in a slightly slower sequence. The content doesn’t change based on what you did, you just uncovered what was already sitting there.

A next button is access.

A completion bar is access.

A recorded video is access, and a very good recorded video is very good access, which is a genuinely useful thing to have, but it isn’t interaction, and calling it interactive doesn’t make it so.

A chat box is potential interaction. It becomes interaction when someone reads what’s in it and lets it change the next ten minutes. If nobody responds to it, it’s a suggestion box bolted to the side of a broadcast.

A poll is the same story. Ask people to vote, show the results, then continue with the slide you were always going to show next. That’s access with a decorative flourish. Ask people to vote, then say “right, most of you said the second one, so let’s go there instead”, now something has actually happened.

Breakout rooms are the one that catches people out. Genuine interaction between learners, yes, absolutely. Participation, no, not unless what comes out of those rooms changes the shape of the session. Otherwise it’s a nice conversation in a side room while the main agenda waits, unchanged, for everyone to come back.

The test I’ve landed on is simple: could this session have run identically if I hadn’t turned up?
If yes, I had access. Nothing more.

How researchers help shape and explore interaction

Say you clear the bar and you’re genuinely running interaction, not just access. There’s still a question about what kind, and this is where I think a lot of us have a blind spot.

Mayer’s work on multimedia learning covers learner-to-content interaction. This is where the learner is working with the material in a way that builds understanding rather than just receiving it.

Garrison, Anderson and Archer look at learner-to-instructor, the exchange between the person learning and the person guiding.

And Bruffee’s work on collaborative learning covers learner-to-learner, the exchange between the people in the room with each other.

Three types. Now look at where the money and effort go.

We invest heavily in learner-to-content. It’s the one that scales, the one that produces an asset you can point to, the one that looks like progress on a project plan.
We invest a bit in learner-to-instructor, usually in the form of a Q&A at the end when everyone’s already got one eye on their next meeting.

Learner-to-learner we mostly leave to chance, and then we’re surprised when a cohort doesn’t gel. It’s the hardest one to manufacture and the easiest one to skip, and it’s frequently the one people remember years later. Nobody has ever told me the interactive module changed their thinking. Plenty of people have told me about a conversation they had with someone else in the room.

Meanwhile, an owl is teaching me Japanese

I’ve been learning Japanese on Duolingo, and I’ve been trying to work out why an app holds me when an hour with a real live human expert didn’t.

It isn’t the gamification, or not mostly. It’s that the thing responds to me. I get something wrong and it doesn’t just mark it and move on, it brings that item back later, at roughly the moment I’m about to lose it. (Which is Ebbinghaus again, and I’ve already written about him, so I’ll leave that there.) The same piece of content comes at me four different ways (listen to it, build it out of word tiles, read it in kana, say it out loud) and which of those I get depends on what I’ve been fluffing.

That’s interaction. Actual interaction. Something goes out from me and what comes back has been shaped by what I sent.

And here’s the part I find genuinely interesting. Duolingo is almost entirely learner-to-content. There’s no learner-to-instructor, because there’s no instructor. Learner-to-learner is a leaderboard, which is competition rather than conversation. I have never learned one thing from the strangers I am ruthlessly trying to beat each week, and I am not trying to beat them for pedagogical reasons.

Participation? None whatsoever. I have no say in the curriculum, the sequence, or the pace. I get what the owl decides I get.

One rung, on one axis, done extremely well. And it’s enough – I’m learning, I’m coming back, I’m entertained. Which might be the most useful thing in this whole argument: you don’t need all three. You need to be honest about which one you’re doing, and then be seriously good at it.

Participation is the expensive one

I want to be fair about why we stop at access, because I don’t think it’s laziness.

Participation costs control. If learners genuinely shape what happens, you can’t fully script it, you can’t guarantee you’ll cover everything on the agenda, and you can’t promise a stakeholder exactly what will be delivered in that hour. It requires a facilitator who can hold a room while not entirely knowing where it’s going. That’s a real skill and it’s uncomfortable even when you have it.

Access is safe. Access is predictable. Access can be signed off in advance and reported on afterwards, and completion rates will tell you a satisfying story about how many people opened the thing.

So we build for access, and then we advertise it with the language of participation, and people arrive with their coffee ready expecting to be involved in something.

The coffee

I’m not asking for every webinar to be a co-designed democratic exercise. The owl certainly isn’t running one. Sometimes access is genuinely the right call, when you have information, people need it, send it out cleanly and let everyone get on with their day. That’s a completely respectable thing to do.

What I’m asking is that we stop describing the bottom rung as the top one. Don’t promise me connection and hand me a broadcast. If it’s a presentation, tell me it’s a presentation and I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly… and I might even enjoy it, because a well-made presentation is a good thing.

But if you tell me it’s going to be engaging, and you talk up the room and the conversation and the expertise in it, then something has to actually come back when I lean in.

I’d made the coffee. I was ready. That was the part that stung. It wasn’t that the session was dull, but that I’d turned up willing to be part of something, and there was nothing there to be part of.