Virtual Classrooms and Their Challenge of Interaction—An Evaluation of Chat Activities and Logs in an Online Course about Digital Medicine with Heterogeneous Participants

Learning digital competencies can be successful if the information is also tried out immediately using interactive elements. However, interactive teaching poses a particular challenge, especially in large group formats. Various strategies are used to promote interaction, but there is little known about the results. This article shows different strategies and evaluates their influence on the interaction rate in a large group course over two terms that teaches digital medicine. Log files and participation in surveys as well as participation in chat were quantitatively evaluated. In addition, the chat messages themselves were evaluated qualitatively. For the evaluation, relation to the total number of participants was particularly relevant in order to be able to determine an interaction rate in the individual course sessions. A maximum average interaction rate of 90.97% could be determined over the entire term while the participants wrote an average of 3.96 comments during a session in the chat. In summary, this research could show that interactive elements should be well planned and used at regular intervals in order to reap the benefits.