Schweir and Misanchuk postulate that artificial intelligence and/or virtual reality may be required for multimedia software to exhibit mutual interactivity - a dialogue in which both the learner and the software are responding to each other with a high de gree of freedom.

We believe that mutual interactivity is also present in software that facilitate person-to-person interactions, like the video-enhanced email shown in this example from Lotus Notes. When groupware and similar types of applications are used for instruction al/educational purposes, the interactivity experienced by learners is "mutually interactive," even though another human being is providing the response and the computer technology is simply facilitating the dialogue. Of course in this case we are no longe r speaking strictly of the dialogue between the learner and the program; the program's role is not much different here than it is in proactive interactivity, but the learner's experience is qualitatively different, and learner 's experience is the basis for Scheir and Misanchik's classification of interactivity types.

Schweir, R. and Misanchuk, E. (1993). Interactive multimedia instruction. . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology.