The effectiveness of ICT-enhanced teaching mode using activity theory on raising class interaction and satisfaction in an engineering course

ABSTRACT

Activity theory is of great importance in emphasizing the role of community and intermediary tools in the subject's internalization activities. From the perspective of activity theory, via systematically and comprehensively exploring kinds of different interactions between various elements (e.g. subject, community and tools) in classroom teaching, this study constructed a framework based on ICT-enhanced activity system, and proposed a teaching mode using the constructed framework. To verify its effectiveness in improving classroom interaction and satisfaction, the proposed teaching mode is applied to an engineering course. The experimental results showed that the proposed teaching mode can not only effectively combine theoretical learning with practical application, but also raise students' classroom interaction and satisfaction through rich teaching activities (including such as competitive answering, topic discussion and achievement sharing, etc.). As demonstrated in our experiment, compared with the traditional teaching modes, (i) 83.8% of the participants were more satisfied with the proposed mode, and 70.3% of them preferred that this mode could be maintained in the future teaching; (ii) better instructional design of engineering courses with the accompanying more satisfactions can be gained using the proposed teaching mode. Theoretical and practical contributions to the integration of ICT with engineering courses are offered.

KEYWORDS:

• ICT
• teaching mode
• activity theory
• interaction and satisfaction
• engineering course

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No: 2020AAA0108804) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No: CCNU20ZN009 and 20205170443).

Notes on contributors

Zhicheng Dai

Zhicheng Dai is an associate professor in the National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning (NERCEL), Central China Normal University (CCNU). He received a Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China, in 2008. His research interests include smart education environment, education technology theory and application.

Junxia Xiong

Junxia Xiong obtained her Master degree at Ningbo University (NBU) in Ningbo. She is presently working as a research assistant in the National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning (NERCEL), Central China Normal University (CCNU). Her research focuses on the instructional design and development of modern education technologies. In the past year, she provided technical service and teacher training for more than 300 teachers in CCNU.

Liang Zhao

Liang Zhao received a Ph.D. in electronic engineering from University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland in 2015 From 2015 to 2017, she held a postdoctoral position at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics @ UCD (Insight@UCD), Dublin, Ireland. She has been an Associate Professor at Central China Normal University (CCNU) since 2017. She is the author of 14 journal papers (including ten SCI papers) and 18 conference papers. Her research interests include data analysis and prediction, time and frequency analysis.

Xiuling He

Xiuling He is a professor in the National Engineering Laboratory for Educational Big Data (NELEBD), Central China Normal University (CCNU). She received a Ph.D. degree in computer applications from University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), China, in 2006. Her research interests include software development, education technology theory and application.