With the advent of online educational platforms and the advances in pedagogical technologies, self-directed learning has emerged as one of the most popular modes of learning. Distance education—elevated by the COVID-19 pandemic—involves methods of instruction through a variety of remote activities which often rely on educational videos for mastery. In the absence of direct student engagement, the asynchronous nature of remote activities may deteriorate the quality of education for learners. Students often have an illusion of skill acquisition after watching videos, which results in overestimation of abilities and skills. We focus on the efficacy of skill acquisition through interactive technologies and assess their efficacy in computational thinking in comparison with delivery through other traditional media (e.g. videos and texts). In particular, we investigate the relationship between actual learning, perception of learning, and learners’ confidence in higher education. Our results reveal intriguing observations about the role of interactivity and visualization and their implications on the pedagogical design for self-directed learning modules.