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A Study of Supplementing Conventional Business Education with Digital Games.

2017; IEEE Computer Society; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1436-4522

Abida Ellahi, Bilal Zaka, F. Dawood Sultan,

Online Learning and Analytics

Introduction If we teach today's students, as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow--John Dewey (1915) Technology in education has been on upsurge during recent years. The modern advancement in educational technologies has given different opportunities to educational establishments for embracing new types of learning. The improvement of effective learning in a computer or technology mediated learning environment is an exciting challenge. The major challenge postulated by the technology in education is that students who are born in this computerized and versatile digital age participate in learning from an exceptionally assorted point of view than their forerunners (Pollara, 2011). These types of students were called by Prensky (2001) as natives,' who are at low compatibility with faculty called as 'digital immigrants'. The low compatibility between the teacher and students brought by new educational technologies, stresses a need for revising the existing pedagogical strategies so that learning outcomes of the students can be enhanced. Pakistan has lagged the world in adopting the educational technologies as the use of innovative tools in education are at their infancy. For this country, where there are not many learning advancements, studies exploring the potentials of technologies in education are crucial. Hence, this study has tried to investigate the extent to which new learning technologies can influence learning adequacy in Pakistan and to what degree these advances can be utilized as supplementary components for the existing teaching strategies. For this purpose, digital games have been tested in business education studies in a university setting. The study was planned to investigate the effects of digital games on learning satisfaction and perceived learning performance of business graduates with moderating role of instructor support. Literature review Digital games in education Majority academic and professional institutes have identified the need for new forms of learning, beyond traditional learning and training methods. Among these new forms of learning or teaching methods, Digital Game-based Learning (DGBL) has been gaining popularity and attention (Rondon, Sassi & Andrade, 2013). This Digital Game-based Learning has been considered as a different instructional method to increase learning which cannot be addressed by the traditional lecture-discussion instruction. The digital games are not only interesting for children but for teachers and researchers as well due to their rich features representing a real environment (Squire, 2002). Researchers and developers are trying to explore new ways to exploit the interactive potential of digital games in the learning environments within the boundaries of psychological and philosophical beliefs about learning process (Hannafin, 1992). However, the effectiveness of digital game based learning still needs clarification and validation for generalizability. Games containing educational objectives are thought to be helpful, more interesting, and, thus, more effective in the learning of academic subjects (Popescu, Romero & Usart, 2013). For this reason, academic world has been trying to provide personal learning environments (PLE) by introducing new technologies like games (Gasland, 2011). For example, reference schools such as Harvard Business School have meant to make a progress, from the evolution of paper based study cases into simulations and interactive case studies where the learners could play a realistic situation, to learning by doing (Srikant, Garvin & Cullen, 2010). Many researchers have been using different research designs and theoretical frameworks for explaining and measuring digital game based learning. Although these studies have provided enough evidence about the effectiveness of digital games in learning, there do not exist sufficient facts about such games in higher education (Ozcelik, Cagiltay & Ozcelik, 2013). …