Digital competition and capabilities' augmentation on international cohorts: evidence from the 'case competition 2019'

Abstract

Intertwining the fields of education policy research (EPR) and educational experiment research (EER), this investigation exploits the usage of digital technologies and team-competition to test whether the phenomenon of digital competition yields a divergent (and likely more positive) impact than traditional classroom coursework, measurable on the degree of learning (criterion 1) and satisfaction (criterion 2) within a target population of international higher education students (HES). An event fashioned and simply dubbed as 'case competition', provided the context and virtual environment for a quasi-experiment which assigned participants (the experiment group) to seven teams competing to solve an industry case. Primary data obtained from the latter through an individual anonymised event's feedback-questionnaire was crossed-checked against a dataset of the overall annual students' evaluation of education quality (SEEQ) instrument; the respondents constitute the opposing control group. Results unravelled hidden benefits of endowing classroom-instruction with this off-stream approach. Furthermore, this led to the modelling of the digital competition augmented learning (DCAL) framework merging the virtues of three main bodies of educational theory: student-centric learning (SCL); problem-based learning (PBL) and technology-enhanced learning (TEL).