The DSR Components Combined with the AT

The DSR framework combined with the Activity Theory used by the researcher in this dissertation induced a new approach in the field of research in the Tanzanian higher education context. The systematic approach to handling the identified practical problems at CBE had been accomplished through several activities performed by researchers, teachers, software developers, and the students. Figure 3.2 demonstrate a kind of technique for describing systems as several interrelated human activities for example the co-design and develop artefact stage (input to this stage include requirements like sharing of education resources and output the CBEMET artefact). The role of the AT connected to the activities in the 5 stages is that of narrating the relationships of people and the interactions during the process. The processes done in different activities from requirements definition to co-evaluation benefitted the teachers, students at CBE, and the researcher who participated in the overall co-designing and development and co-evaluation of the CBEMET prototype activities. Teachers at CBE were not used to the DSR framework. Hence, this study introduced them to this type of research, which they found empowering.

Figure 3.1.1: The DSR co-design and develop artefact stage shown as activity-based

The different activities described by Johannesson and Perjons [57] and depicted in figure 3.2 are connected to the AT in the sense of the activities themselves and the human beings who are performing those activities using tools to a common goal. In performing the activities, the human beings (teachers and students in this study) are expected to be governed by rules, use tools, have work relationships to better achieve their goals (output).

According to Kuuti [59], the structure of an activity normally comprises four possible elements: tool, subject, object, and the outcome realized after the transformation process. In this study the end-outcome of all the activities is the realization of an innovative teaching and learning using the CBEMET which in the process of co-design and development followed the DSR framework whose activities are better explained through the AT see figure 3.4.

The detailed activities happening in each stage are described in the following sections.

3.2.1 Explication of the problem

There are various practical problems viable for a thorough analysis in HEIs before any measures to solve them are taken. The investment regarding time and money in analyzing such problems is quite rewarding. So, explication of the problem in the DSR framework is crucial, as it induces a precise formulation of a problem and realizes a reasonable justification for solving such a problem. Teachers as well as the students at the four campuses of the College of Business Education have been experiencing various practical issues to provide quality education. Table 3.1 summarizes the problems impeding provision of quality education as far as the College of Business Education as an HEI is concerned.

Table 3.1: Summary of educational problems faced by CBE

Practical Problem Description Difficulty in sharing

educational materials

There was much difficulty in sharing teaching notes among the four campuses. This induced the provision of different amounts of material for the same courses between the four campuses. That is, the same course used to be taught differently in the four campuses.

Mobile training for teachers and students

The introduction of LMS adopted by the college, such as Learning Management Systems (SARIS), was not preceded by training of both teachers and students. This induced the failure of the information systems in the first place

Lack of innovative teaching and learning

Teachers used to rely on their own teaching notes every year, and students used to copy notes in preparation for examinations, which mostly came from the notes.

The practice thus hampered the learners’ creativity and innovations in education

Manual processing

of examinations The manual processing of examinations induced several errors and unnecessarily late delivery of examination results

Due to manual processing of examinations, there would always be errors in the examinations, which were hard very to correct

The advent of mobile technologies and the development of infrastructure in HEIs has allowed mobile device usage in teaching and learning. To minimize the related educational challenges facing CBE, the management of the College of Business Education decided to introduce a mobile learning system known as SARIS. In SARIS, teachers are supposed to enroll first, and the head of department (HOD) is supposed to assign subjects to teachers each semester. After being assigned a subject by the HOD, a teacher can then use SARIS to upload coursework and use SARIS calculators to find grades of each students’ total marks at the end of semesters. Students can then access their results in each subject they have studied in that semester. However, training on how to use the new system was unsatisfactory. Consequently, many teachers disregarded the SARIS and returned to the manual processing

of examinations, which they were used to. Students also complained about the difficulty in accessing results when they are out [52].

3.2.2 Outlining and understanding artefact before defining requirements

This activity enabled the researcher to first know and acknowledge the role of an artefact in solving a practical problem in question. Second, it allows the researcher to determine the role of users of the artefact to define the requirements thereof. The contributions of the ultimate users of the artefact in defining their requirements in the new artefact are intended to minimize the chances of errors after its development. The artefact in this dissertation is a mobile education tool geared towards enabling teachers and students to share related educational materials across all four campuses of CBE.

3.2.3 Artefact co-designing and development.

Artefact design and development is one of the crucial steps in the DSR framework. In this study, teachers provided sketches of the design freely in a workshop organized for co-designing; each teacher provided his/her design sketch. The sketches were followed by a round of discussion; subsequently, the final sketch was agreed upon (see the sketch in Figure 3.2). The menu design session was clearly understood by all the teachers, who had a chance to explain the main menu items they chose to be included. After several trials of co-designing, a concrete prototype was developed to meet the requirements of the teachers at CBE.

Figure 3.2: One of the sketches of the prototype main menu by a teacher during the co-design phase

3.2.4 Artefact demonstration

Artefact demonstration is an activity aimed at testing whether the designed artefact has at least solved in one way or another some of the identified practical problems. According to Peffers et al. [114], the demonstration can best be completed through experimentation and simulations. Demonstration of the CBEMET prototype to the end-users was performed in a real-life setting by involving all the teachers who participated in the co-designing and development activity (Figure 3.3). During the demonstration, the researcher carefully observed the teachers’ immediate reactions and how they engaged with the prototype. As the teachers who had first-hand experience with the developed artefact, the demonstration allowed them to compare the sketches of the menu they made with the resulting artefact and its functionality in a real-life setting. Figure 3.3 shows the teachers’ engagement with the prototype during the demonstration.

Figure 3.3: Teachers trying to access the CBEMET prototype on their own

3.2.5 Artefact co-evaluation

Artefact evaluation entails checking whether an artefact satisfies requirements that were set during the requirement definition phase. It is intended to determine whether an artefact satisfactorily solves the practical problem(s) it was intended for. In evaluation, while the researcher should make sure to observe and measure the behaviour of the artefact in solving the burning issues i.e., the identified problem(s) in the context in which it was designed and developed, comparing the artefact performance with requirements stipulated by the users should be considered. However, as presented by Venable et al. [123], an evaluation can also have other purposes. If the outcome does not satisfy expectations, the researcher can return to the co-designing and development stage to develop a new artefact [124].

According to Johannesson and Perjons [57, p. 80], the evaluation is normally conducted rigorously using a range of adequate research strategies and methods. There are at least two evaluation strategies for an artefact:

ex-ante and ex-post evaluations [57]. Ex-ante evaluation occurs when an artefact is evaluated without being used or even being fully developed.

Ex-evaluations can be conducted quickly and do not require extensive resources or access to users or organizations, they are ideal for formative evaluations when an initial design or prototype is to be assessed rapidly and inexpensively to obtain feedback for further improvements. However, ex-ante evaluations can possibly easily induce false positives, i.e., an artefact is judged as being better than it is since the ex-ante evaluation only investigates a preliminary version of the artefact. Thus, in most situations, so to say, ex-ante evaluations cannot provide reliable results for summative evaluations. Ex post evaluations normally have a possibility to offer advantages and disadvantages that mirrored those of ex-ante evaluations. They are less prone to errors than ex-ante evaluations because they involve evaluations of completed artefacts.

However, they consume more resources, take a long time, and require access to people or organizations to materialize. Thus, ex-post evaluations are often more suitable for summative than for formative evaluations.

3.3 Activity Theory and CBEMET

The Activity Theory (AT) normally sees the integration of technology as a tool for mediating social action [125]. The tools or artefacts include for example, some instruments, variety of signs, language and signs, machines, applications, and computers. The origin of the AT was conceived within Soviet psychology, though there is an emerging multidisciplinary and international community of scientific thought united by the central category of activity—a community exceeding the original background.

According to Kuuti [59], the structure of an activity comprises four elements namely —tool, subject, object, and outcome—realized after the transformation process (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4: The structure of an activity adapted from Kuuti [59]

Broadly defined, an AT is really a philosophical and cross-disciplinary framework helping researchers for studying different forms of human practices taken as development processes activities, both individual and social levels interlinked simultaneously accordingly. According to Kuuti [59], there are three key principles of AT, namely: activities as a basis for analysis, history and development and artefacts and mediation. Of these three, one is closely related to this research and prototype making and it is explained as follows:

Artefacts and mediation Activity. An activity will always contain various artefacts to mention a few such as instruments, signs, procedures, machines, methods, laws, forms of work organization, etc. This is like the explanation of the artefact defined by Johannesson and Perjons [57, p. 3], and it made it suitable to combine the two when understanding the processes in the co-designing and co-evaluation of the CBEMET as an artefact. The relationships that exists between elements of an activity are not direct but mediated: for a simple example, an instrument mediated between for example, an actor and the object of doing; the object is seen and be manipulated not “as such”

but within the limitations set by the instrument (see e.g., Engeström [126, pp. 6-17]. Artefacts themselves have been created and transformed while developing the activity itself in the process and carrying with them a particular culture of an environment —historical remains from that kind of explained development.

An AT emphasizes users’ involvement in the context, for example, in the development application, in this case, the CBE teachers and students.

Following the theory, the teachers and students at CBE were involved in varying activities, ranging from a scenario of partial participants who heavily depended on the material mediation of some tools to full participants who could offer more flexibly use the cultural tools of narrative practice [127].

That is, mobile technology in this perspective is not perceived as the object of learning but as a tool to support students’ learning activities, which are applied in the study involving their teachers’ aspects in their own teaching and learning activities using a mobile education tool. Instead of designing a mobile education tool (artefact) in isolation, the AT suggests that there is a need for human endeavour at large through the participation of the concerned users allowing the focus on the activities and social interactions.

3.4 Co-development of the CBEMET

The co-development of the CBEMET prototype according to the DSR frame-work supported by the AT, and started by the CBE teachers, involved providing requirements for the mobile education tool to solve their practical problems related to education delivery—Papers I and II. The need to get students to define requirements came after the first design cycle of the DSR. The AT supports the DSR framework by Johannesson and Perjons [51], specifically in understanding the relationship between human activities supported by tools to enhance or transform their lives (Figure 3.1). In this dissertation, teachers and students at CBE needed the tool, CBEMET, to change the way they share educational materials and, specifically, enhance innovative teaching and learning activities. Therefore, in the first design cycle of the CBEMET prototype as practical artefact addressed research question 1—identifying teachers’ mobile education training, education contents to be shared, and the sharing of teaching experiences for the overall mission of innovative teaching and learning to be done at CBE. The second DSR design cycle of the CBEMET prototype as practical artefact, was motivated by the initial demonstration and evaluation. At this point, new requirements were revealed (Figure 3.1). Some

of the new requirements that emerged were the need to provide students with access to the prototype, consideration of students’ requirements, and the need for SRL [31]. Hence, an input to the research question 2, about sharing educational materials and a new requirement for an artefact to solve, became the students’ need to attain SRL and thereby improve their innovative learning. Research question 3 evaluated the functionality of the CBEMET prototype in facilitating innovative teaching and learning for both the teachers and students (teachers to use technology in teaching and students to attain SRL). Furthermore, research question 4 centred on the impacts and experiences of the teachers and students after using the CBEMET prototype, for which the teachers and students commended the CBEMET prototype as an innovative teaching and learning enhancement at CBE.

3.5 Summary

The design and subsequent development of the CBEMET prototype as an artefact had followed and adapted Johannesson and Perjons’ DSR framework [57] combined with AT [59]. AT supported the DSR framework in that it provides an appropriate framework for the social interactions of people when working together. AT is said to be a socio-cultural, socio-historical lens through which designers can analyze human activity systems. It focuses on interaction of different human activities and consciousness within its relevant environmental context. However, the DSR framework entails a process of determining a solution for practical problems facing an environment, and the nature of activities in DSR suggests that people work together through the defined stages. The AT also narrates the artefacts as tools for improving human development and their lives; similarly, the DSR framework targets to solve practical problems which, in turn, improves the situation of a particular environment through an artefact. The DSR framework has five steps, which were thoroughly followed by this study: starting with problem explication, followed by outlining an artefact and then defining requirements, designing, and developing an artefact, demonstrating an artefact, and finally

definition, co-design and co-development, demonstration, and then finally co-evaluation—where teachers and students were involved in different activities of producing the CBEMET as a prototype for innovative teaching and learning. The goal for both the teachers and students was innovation (goal of the activity), the subject was the teachers and students, tool (CBEMET), community is described in the application context of the CBEMET, which is the CBE, and the rules were the different directives, guidelines, and ethical issues that governed the whole activity of producing the CBEMET prototype (Figure 3.1).

The following chapter presents how the DSR components were used to demonstrate the co-designed and developed mobile education tool, known as the CBEMET prototype.

4 CBEMET ARTEFACT DEVELOPMENT

4.1 The 1^st Development Iteration of the CBEMET

There is a worldwide call for a change to foster innovative teaching and learning in HEIs [128]. Research has shown that mobile education tools and games have greatly improved teaching and learning in HEIs and other disciplines [129], [130], [131], [74]. The use of teaching tools to enhance students’

learning and improve teachers’ ability to deliver quality education has been taking place in all levels of education in Tanzania and in other emerging economies [132]. Mobile technologies increase students’ ability to access learning materials, which are abundant available online, avoiding reliance on teachers’ notes. Mobile applications such as the CBEMET prototype enable students to acquire self-control in learning (SRL)—becoming experts in finding the different sources of educational resources themselves to increase their knowledge and sharing with others online through mobile devices and mobile educational tools [31]. Consequently, numerous relevant mobile online educational tools have been developed to enhance the provision of quality education in different contexts [133], [134], [135]. Examples of these tools are MobilED [136] and MobileEdu [65], which were intended to help university students learn computer science in Nigeria. Likewise, the MXit education tool [137] was developed in the South African context to facilitate distance education in South Africa. In Ghana, YouTube videos are used to promote active mobile learning in HEIs [138].

The need for attaining an innovative teaching and learning level in HEIs in Tanzania inspired ideas to start thinking about a design and development of an artefact agreed be called CBEMET prototype to mitigate the reported challenges during problem explication stage which whose solution were associated with the use of ICTs. Furthermore, some teachers were reported to have challenges in using ICTs as teaching aids and tools [139]. CBEMET is intended to solve the existing teaching and learning approaches at CBE, which

do not prepare students to be innovative. In developing the prototype, the DSR framework of Johannesson and Perjons [57] was applied.

4.1.1 Explication of practical problems at CBE

The College of Business Education was inaugurated by the Late and first President of Tanzania Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (teacher in Kiswahili language) in 1965. It is therefore, one of the oldest colleges in Tanzania. It was established under the Parliamentary Act known as College of Business Education Act, Cap. 315 R.E 2002. During first years after its establishment, CBE has been one of the leading business schools in Tanzania, producing many well-qualified graduates for employment.

Then came the dark years, when the quality of education slowly declined due to too many students in classrooms, inadequate teaching staff and lack of adequate teaching tools, etc. Furthermore, teachers in the four campuses differed in the materials they provided to students at the same level of

Then came the dark years, when the quality of education slowly declined due to too many students in classrooms, inadequate teaching staff and lack of adequate teaching tools, etc. Furthermore, teachers in the four campuses differed in the materials they provided to students at the same level of