Exploring Affordances of an Online Environment: A Case-Study of Electronics Engineering Undergraduate Students’ Activity in Mathematics

Abstract

Online learning environments are being used for teaching and learning of mathematics at university level. Exploiting the potential of digital technology, these Internet-based environments administer computer-generated homework, assistance and feedback for students. This article presents a case-study of a small group of ִ undergraduate engineering students' learning activity in mathematics in an online environment. The study focuses on students' interactions with the online environment to make sense of the affordances of this environment. Utilizing multiple sources of data aid in analyzing the intentional and the operational aspects of students' interactions with several resources in this environment. With regard to both of these aspects, the affordances are thus viewed as features of the environment which support students' engagement with the mathematical tasks. The analyses show that the students incorporated several online resources for solving the tasks posed in the automated system. Students met requirements of final answers in the automated system through varying sequences of mathematical operations for the posed tasks. The conditions of the automated system as well as the rules of the collective activity system played a role in students' interactions with the mathematical tasks.

Student Engagement with Technology-Enhanced Resources in Mathematics in Higher Education: A Review

“…Many of the influencing factors outlined by Bond and Bedenlier [7] have already been identified in a number of the studies on the use of technology to support student engagement in higher education [30,34,44,53,63,68] and in mathematics education [33,46,50,55,57,69]. Table 3 outlines the factors that impact on student engagement as found in studies that are relevant to undergraduate mathematics.…”

“…Kanwal [57] Behaviour engagement: Activity Theory Automated system to support solving of mathematical tasks, variety of technology resources including GeoGebra, MyMathlab, YouTube, and online calculators.…”

“…Within mathematics education research, there is also evidence to suggest that student engagement and the use of technology impacts on learning [3,31,51,52]. Studies on the use of specific technologies in mathematics education have highlighted benefits of student engagement with technologies such as mobile apps [46]; innovative digital tools, i.e., GeoGebra and Desmos [55]; tablets and screencasts [56]; flipped classroom [50]; and online environments [57]. In addition, engagement in mathematics and science has been shown to foster long term participation in STEM [3] (p. 5).…”

Mathematics in Engineering Education: a Review of the Recent Literature with a View towards Innovative Practices

“…In this section we consider research studies concerning the use of resources (including digital resources) by engineering students, which is another way of looking at student learning strategies. Kanwal (2020) observed the work of engineering students in a distant course using a digital learning environment (MyMathLab, MML). The environment offered different kinds of resources.…”

Organization of Independent Work in Teaching Mathematics to University Students in the Digital Educational Environment

“…Наиболее актуальным является применение электронных образовательных контентов в сети Интернет Petropoulou 2020;. При этом в зарубежной литературе выделяются различные виды учебных Интернет-материалов (Bozkurt Aras, 2021;: хотлист (hotlist), трежахант (treasurehunt), сабджектсэмпла (subjectsampler), мультимедиа скрэпбук (multimediascrapbook), веб-квест (webquest), которые активно применяются в образовательном процессе вуза Kanwal, 2020;.…”