In his inaugural attempt using the application, Ferriter posted VoiceThreads about a variety of topics online, encouraging students to comment on them voluntarily on their own time. He got dozens -- even hundreds -- of comments on each. It was a revelation. "I can basically extend my classroom," he says.

Ferriter says more students participate more actively in digital discussions than in the classroom. "You don't have to be the loud one or the popular one," he points out. When he asked his students about their online involvement, he said they cited the sense of safety: "They can think about their comments beforehand." They also liked the fact that any VoiceThread has multiple conversations going on at once. "In a classroom conversation, there's generally one strand of conversation going at any one time, and if you're bored by that particular strand, you're completely disengaged," says Ferriter.

Ferriter says more students participate more actively in digital discussions than in the classroom. "You don't have to be the loud one or the popular one," he points out. When he asked his students about their online involvement, he said they cited the sense of safety: "They can think about their comments beforehand."

Direct Manipulation Principle: As the complexity of the materials increases, the impact of direct manipulation (animation, pacing) of the learning materials on the transfer of knowledge also increases.

However, when the average student is engaged in higher-order thinking using multimedia in interactive situations, on average, that student's percentage ranking on higher-order or transfer skills increases by 32 percentile points over what the student would have accomplished with traditional learning.

In fact, Michael Moore, of the American Journal of Distance Education, wrote that interactivity between a learner and the content is “the defining characteristic of education. Without it there cannot be education, since it is the process of intellectually interacting with content that results in changes in the learner’s understanding, the learner’s perspective, or the cognitive structures of the learner’s mind .”

William Horton, a leading expert in the field of web-based instructional design, in his work titled Designing Web-Based Training. Horton writes, “Interactivity boosts learning. People learn faster and develop more positive attitudes when learning is interactive.”