Investigating the effects of web-mediated design thinking and co-regulated learning on developing students' computing skills in a blended course

摘要

As Internet and educational technologies are increasingly used in higher education in recent years, teachers should design and provide effective online teaching methods to help students achieve satisfactory learning performance. Based on the needs in computing courses and the necessity to build up students' regular learning habits in online learning environments, the author in this study integrated design thinking (DT) with co-regulated learning (CRL) to develop students' computing skills, and conducted a quasi-experiment to examine the effects of DT and CRL. The participants in this study were 153 undergraduates from three classes taking a compulsory course entitled 'Applied Information Technology: Data Processing.' The first class (DT and CRL group) simultaneously received the intervention of web-mediated DT and CRL, the second class (CRL group) received the intervention of web-mediated CRL, and the last group (control group) received the traditional teaching method, although teaching was conducted in a blended class. Based on the analysis carried out in this study, students who received the intervention of web-mediated DT had significantly better computing skills in using Excel than those without. In addition, web-mediated CRL also contributed to significantly better development of computing skills. The author expects that this study could provide insights into the design of web-mediated DT and CRL for teachers, educators, and schools.