Effective Use of Digital Textbooks: A Hybrid Framework of Acceptance and Self-Determination in Higher Education Programming Courses

Contribution: This study has proposed a hybrid framework of acceptance and self-determination for the use of digital textbooks in higher education programming courses. The intertwined relationships between acceptance and self-determination factors, and their joint effects on student’s engagement and learning performance are all examined. Background: Despite the proliferation of education technologies, their acceptance and performance among students are still limited by the active participation of students, especially for engineering training of higher education. Traditional acceptance-related factors face challenges in explaining the engagement of students in using new technology, which calls for an integrated examination for their interconnection and joint effects. Research Questions: 1) How do acceptance and self-determination factors influence each other in using digital textbooks? 2) How do acceptance and self-determination factors jointly affect student’s engagement and learning performance? Methodology: By collecting data from students in a programming course using HTML5 package (H5P) digital textbooks, this study examined relationships in the hybrid framework through partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings: This study reveals the relationship between acceptance and self-determination, which verified the mediation effect of self-determination between perceived usefulness / ease of use and acceptance. Besides, the acceptance of students, along with competence and relatedness, could significantly facilitate learning engagement, which further increases the learning performance.