Indulging interactivity: a learning management system as a facilitative boundary object

With the recent global pandemic, education institutions including higher education have shifted to offering online instruction for a prolonged period of time. Faculty and instructors have had to transform the content of face-to-face instruction into a format fit for distance education. In the virtual space, understanding or facilitating interactivity is a key component of online teaching for sustaining engagement and social interactions; promoting active learning between participants; and providing resources, tasks, and activities. The learning management system as a facilitative boundary object makes pivoting to online classes more tactical when adopting cultural-historical activity theory as an analytical lens, which can be used as a guide to re-envision how interactions can be implemented in e-learning or online courses and how instructors can repurpose resources and tools to maximize their instructional practices. Examples of interactivity and the implications for practitioners are synthesized, and the multiple components at play in the online and hybrid space are characterized in order to promote the exchange of practices and knowledge mobilization.