Advancing open learning through interactive open educational resources

Synthesis: Ahmadfard (2026) asks what interactivity means inside open educational resources, how interactive features shape student experience and outcomes, and what blocks adoption, and answers with a structured literature review and thematic synthesis rather than new data. The search ran in Scopus for 1970 to 2026, English only, all document types, records extracted on 15 January 2026, with a keyword co-occurrence map at a minimum threshold of 50 occurrences. The review defines interactive OER as openly licensed materials that deliberately embed simulations, branching scenarios, formative assessment, feedback, or adaptive features. It grounds their design in active learning, constructivism, cognitive load theory, and Universal Design for Learning, and reports effects through cited studies, such as normalized gains of 0.48 in interactive engagement courses against 0.23 in traditional ones. It can organize a fragmented literature into design guidance. It collects no outcome data and never states how many records it included.

Key Findings

1. The review's definitional move is to treat interactivity as a design commitment rather than a format: interactive OER are openly licensed resources that intentionally integrate simulations, branching scenarios, formative assessment, feedback mechanisms, or adaptive digital features to support active and participatory learning.
2. Six categories of interactivity organize the middle of the paper: simulations, virtual labs, formative assessments, branching scenarios, gamified activities, and collaborative tools, each tied to a learning-theory rationale rather than to outcome evidence from this study.
3. Three core design principles are proposed, user-centered design, scalability and reusability, and alignment with learning outcomes, with the third framed as the safeguard against interactivity that is merely novel.
4. The review's strongest empirical citation is Hake's analysis of more than 6,000 students, where average normalized gains were 0.48 plus or minus 0.14 in interactive engagement courses against 0.23 plus or minus 0.04 in traditional courses, a gap Hake described as almost two standard deviations.
5. On AI, the review reports a mixed-methods survey at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, where 96% of 85 second-year aerospace and medical engineering students had incorporated AI into academic work, most commonly through virtual assistants (88%) and AI-driven platforms (42%).
6. Recurring risks are listed rather than measured: misinformation and hallucination, algorithmic and linguistic bias, ambiguous authorship and disclosure, privacy exposure, automation bias that erodes learner and teacher agency, and unequal access to advanced tools described as a productivity divide.
7. Implementation barriers are structural: development requires coordinated expertise in content, instructional design, programming, and graphics, and resources degrade without maintenance funding, so repositories and community networks are offered as the more durable model.

A review that knows what it is

The paper is unusually explicit about its own epistemic status, and that candor is worth crediting. It states that examples and case studies illustrate recurring patterns rather than providing standalone validation, that all figures and tables except one reflect the author's conceptual synthesis, and that the single data-driven visualization is a Scopus keyword co-occurrence map. Sections that could be mistaken for findings carry disclaimers in place: the contrast between interactive and static materials is called a synthesis, not a tested comparison.

The search itself is documented in detail: two concept blocks combined with AND, one covering open education and open educational practice terms, the other covering interactive, multimedia, simulation, gamified, adaptive, and AI-related terms, restricted to English and to a 1970 to 2026 window. Screening removed duplicates and irrelevant records before full-text assessment. What the text does not give is the arithmetic of that flow: the number of records identified, screened, assessed, and included appears only in the PRISMA-style figure, which the extracted text does not carry. A reader of the prose alone cannot tell whether the synthesis rests on thirty papers or three hundred.

That omission matters more than it would in a narrative review, because the paper's authority rests on coverage. The argument that interactive OER is an emerging category with recurring design patterns is a claim about the shape of a literature, and the shape is exactly what an inclusion count would establish.

Interactivity as a design argument, not a finding

The conceptual spine runs from active learning through constructivism and sociocultural theory to cognitive load theory and Universal Design for Learning. Active learning supplies the requirement for practice, feedback, and reflection, which static materials cannot sustain. Constructivism explains why exploration and multiple representations matter. Cognitive load theory supplies the counterweight, since poorly structured interactivity adds extraneous load and can leave learners worse off than a plain text. Universal Design for Learning converts accessibility from an accommodation into a design premise.

From that spine the paper derives three principles and a taxonomy, and the pairing is the useful part. Each of the six interactive categories is attached to a mechanism rather than to a vendor product. Simulations support hypothesis testing, virtual labs support procedural practice where physical access is limited, and embedded assessment supports retrieval and misconception repair. Branching scenarios support decision and justification, gamification supports sustained motivation when tied to learning goals, and collaborative tools support socially constructed meaning.

The weakness is that most of the supporting evidence concerns active learning or multimedia design in general, not interactive open resources specifically. Hake's gains come from physics courses using interactive engagement, not from openly licensed materials. The UDL evidence comes from accessibility research. So the review establishes that interactive design has good theoretical warrant and that adjacent literatures report benefits. It does not establish that openness adds anything to interactivity, and the paper never isolates that variable.

Where AI enters, and where equity thins out

The AI section is the most current and the least settled. The review's position is that generative tools help most when embedded as an enabling layer inside designed activities that require verification, reflection, and disclosure, and that benefits depend on design choices, literacy support, and governance rather than on tool availability. That is a defensible reading of a literature in which enthusiasm and caution are both well represented.

The equity argument is where the paper's confidence outruns its evidence. Openness is said to widen participation and help close achievement gaps, and interactive resources are said to benefit underserved learners through cost savings and accessibility. The mechanisms are plausible and the cited support is real, but nothing in the review tests whether interactive OER reached those learners, whether device and bandwidth constraints erased the advantage, or whether the added development cost shifted production toward well-resourced institutions. The review says as much in places, noting that without intentional design interactive OER risk reflecting dominant perspectives and losing applicability in low- and middle-income countries. That caution deserves more weight than the framing gives it.

What this means for practice

Instructors should use the taxonomy as a design checklist rather than a shopping list. The question to ask of any interactive element is which learning mechanism it serves: prediction and revision for a simulation, retrieval and feedback for an embedded quiz, decision and consequence for a branching scenario. Interactivity added for its own sake is the failure mode the paper names, and cognitive load theory explains why it is costly.

For instructional designers and faculty developers, the practical content is in the constraints. Interactive resources need content experts, designers, developers, and accessibility specialists at once, which is beyond most individual instructors, so low-barrier routes matter: reusable templates, feedback-enabled quizzes, and authoring tools that produce accessible output by default. For administrators, the paper's warning is about maintenance. A platform-dependent interactive resource that nobody funds will stop working, and preservation planning belongs in the original budget rather than in a later rescue.

Limitations

• The review reports no inclusion counts in the text, so the size and composition of the evidence base cannot be judged from the prose, and the PRISMA-style flow exists only as a figure.
• Most cited outcome evidence concerns active learning, multimedia design, or AI use in general rather than interactive open resources, so the review cannot separate the contribution of interactivity from the contribution of openness.
• The search is single-database and English-only, which biases coverage toward Anglophone publishing, and the paper itself notes that many primary studies are discipline-specific with small samples and weak methods.
• Equity claims are asserted from adjacent literature rather than tested: no access, cost, completion, or outcome data are analyzed, and no comparison between interactive and static OER is conducted.

Citation

Ahmadfard, M. (2026). Advancing open learning through interactive open educational resources. Discover Education, 5, 211.