Instant messenger-based online discourse platform and its impacts on students' academic performances: An exploratory study in art and design education
Introduction
At present, art and design is widely used in many fields, such as industry, advertising, retail, jewelry, interior decoration, television, film, computer graphics, and so on. For art and design education, it led to a wide range of subjects and their combinations, including classical fine arts, design arts, media arts, digital arts, visual designs, public art projects, etc. And, art designers not only create something that is novel and functioning, but also convey their perspectives and ideas that affect users' views. More importantly, art design is often a team activity that involves all participants in exchanging their ideas, analyzing all possible solutions from various perspectives, and then reaching a consensus. Besides basic knowledge and essential skills of art and design, therefore, art and design education is required to help students more efficiently develop their comprehensive abilities (e.g., collaborative ability, transformability from knowledge to skills).
The needs for high quality teaching and learning of art and design are increasing sharply (Design Council, 2011). Learners of art and design desire for a wide variety of accesses to education owing to changes in sites of art and design learning from classroom-based college settings to self-paced learning environments (Souleles, 2011). E-learning is teaching and learning process utilizing information communication technologies (ICT) to access courses outside traditional classroom. In the past decade, it has been progressively accepted by educators as a feasible approach to coping with the social and pedagogical challenges noted above. Due to the lack of sufficient and appropriate professional development and training opportunities in e-learning, however, teachers of art and design usually adopted traditional classroom-based face-to-face teaching and learning methods (Souleles, 2011). On this ground, we proposed an e-learning system named project-based integrated learning environment (PILE) for one of the basic courses of art and design – principles of art pattern design (PAPD) (Cheng and Jiang, 2013, Cheng and Zhang, 2010, Cheng et al., 2011). Subgroup discourse is a key step that enables undergraduates to improve their knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) for art and design. Instant messenger (IM) has a series of attractive features, including multiform messaging (e.g., text, electronic file, audio, and video), instant access to messages (e.g., timely transmission, recordation, storage and retrieval of messages over the Internet), cross-device sharing (e.g., personal computer, tablet computer, and smart phone). As one core infrastructure component of PILE, therefore, online subgroup discourse platform is built currently on a typical IM - QQ. Additionally, considered the teacher-class-student top-down teaching and learning hierarchy, this study implemented a multilevel hierarchical study design to clarify the differences between IM-based online discourse and traditional classroom-based discourse at three levels - TEACHER, CLASS, and STUDENT.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we offer a literature review that covers KSA model, e-learning and its influential factors, and then, raise three research questions. In Section 3, we describe this study protocol, including experimental design and implementation process. Based on study results and discussion in Section 4 Results, 5 Discussion, we summarize and conclude in Section 6.
Section snippets
KSA/competency
The concept of competence or competency, first defined by White and later refined by McClelland, is used to assess students' performance improvement (Lasso, 2010). As a structured guide, a competency consists of a set of predefined descriptors for identifying, assessing, and developing individual KSA (Draganidis and Mentzas, 2006, Kang and Ritzhaupt, 2015, Phelan and Mills, 2011).
Person quality results from an integration of KSA that contribute to superior performance in a special job (Landy
Participants
In 2013, participants in this study were five teachers of PAPD and 456 undergraduates (254 females and 202 males) of twenty classes. They were enrolled from Art and Design College, Hubei University of Technology, Mainland of China. All students are Han Chinese. The ages of students ranged from 17 to 19 years of age (M = 18.39, SD = 0.52), where M and SD represent mean and standard deviation, respectively. The class sizes ranged from 21 to 25 students (M = 22.80, SD = 1.28). Considered their
Descriptive statistics
Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics for exam and rating scores grouped by four factors - GENDER, DISCOURSE, TEACHER, and CLASS. In terms of mean score, it shows a little difference between male and female (exam score: 39.95 vs. 38.44; rating score: 35.42 vs. 34.13). On average, the scores of experimental group were lower than those of control group (exam score: 38.12 vs. 40.07; rating score: 31.92 vs. 37.39).
The mean scores presented noticeable dispersions (exam score: 35.77–42.41 from
Discussion
Similar to previous studies (Mungania, 2003, Schodt, 2002), this study shows minor gender differences in students' academic performances. The main target of this study was to examine four important factors - DISCOURSE, TEACHER, CLASS, and STUDENT. The amazing results about the estimates of variance, covariance and correlation coefficient revealed complicated impacts of the four factors on students' knowledge acquisition, skill improvement and ability development in art pattern design.
Conclusion
This study was to explore the effects of IM-based online discourse on students' KSA at TEACHER, CLASS, and STUDENT levels. The findings of this study suggested that IM-based online discourse was inconsistently inferior to classroom-based face-to-face discourse in developing students' KSA of art and design students at the three levels. Especially at TEACHER level, it accelerated students' transformability from knowledge to skills. Our study also suggested that because of its advantages (e.g.,
Acknowledgments
This study was funded by The Provincial Education Department of Hubei (Humanity and Social Science Projects # 2011jytq030 and # 14q038) and Nation Natural Science Foundation of China (#81373104). The authors thank all project partners for their talents in collecting, processing and illustrating data. We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments on the paper.
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