Research of users behaviour

The research of Sansone, etc. (2011) indicated that the learning the potential use of learning material in real life could turn “unmotivated” students into “motivated” ones. The further study of the very researchers found out that the pre-existing interest in computers would influence the activeness of students, especially when what they were learning would be explicitly related to the real life usage. Based on the above research findings, our application would present those real world websites that “aged well” and make our target audience act as a real website developer to improve or amend these aged websites. Because these websites were once (or still) being running on the internet, learners would be motivated by these real world events and be interested during the problem-solving process.

As to the concern of the learning effectiveness and potential challenge of our application, more researches were taken towards this direction. Liang and Chen (2012) pointed out the challenge faced by online learning, which could be summarised as the quality, commitment and copyright. It is important to define how much our target audience would be expected to learn from our application and whether the form of learning would indeed enhance their skills in the HTML/CSS learning. Also, the website we are using as the learning material for the students should be stick to those archived websites with public API calls offered.

The study by AlHamad, etc. found out the online programming learning, specifically “web programming” could act as a strong enhancement for the traditional face-to-face tutoring method. Related research study also proved the hybrid method of leaning programming (online and traditional) is more effective than the traditional learning for offering students use their cognitive strategies and relevant conceptual knowledge in the programming language context (Cakiroglu, 2013). Our application is aimed to act as a support of traditional HTML/CSS language learning by providing real-world based issue and motivated tasks.

Reference: 

AlHamad, A. Q.,& Al Qawasmi, K. I., 2014, Key factors in determining students’ satisfaction in

online learning based on ‘web programming’ course within Zarqa University, International

Journal of Global Business, 7(1), 7-14, url

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/docview/1562782393?accountid=

14723

Cakiroglu, U., 2013, Using a hybrid approach to facilitate learning introductory programming, The

Journal of Educational Technology, 12(1), 161-177

Liang, R., & Chen, D, V., 2012, Online Learning: Trends, Potential and Challenges, Creative

Education, 3(8), 1332-1335, DOI:10.4236/ce.2012.38195

Sansone, C., Fraughton, T., Zachary, J. L., Butner, J., & Heiner, C., 2011, Self-Regulation of

motivation when learning online: the importance of who, why and how, Educational

Technology Research and Development, 59(2), 199-212, DOI:

10.1007/s11423-011-9193-6