The role of project-based learning with activity theory in teaching effectiveness: Evidence from the internet of things course

Higher education is beginning to focus on how to effectively cultivate IoT engineers who possess both hard skills and soft skills. Therefore, from the perspective of activity theory and combining it with project-based learning, this study constructed a project-based learning framework based on activity theory and applied this framework to an IoT course at a university in central China. The first half of the course adopted a traditional lecture-based teaching method, while the second half of the course was carried out based on the proposed framework, thus constituting a control group and an experimental group. To further explore the effectiveness of the proposed framework on IoT courses, the data of this study consisted of two aspects: on the one hand, questionnaires on students’ learning engagement and satisfaction with the IoT course were collected; on the other hand, with the help of an intelligent teaching analytics platform, the effectiveness of the proposed framework in optimizing the classroom structure was objectively analyzed from three dimensions of teaching mode, classroom atmosphere, and teacher-student intimacy. The experimental results showed that compared with traditional teaching, teaching based on the proposed framework can significantly improve students’ learning engagement and satisfaction. Specifically, the increase in emotional engagement was the highest at 43.07%, followed by a 26.42% increase in behavioral engagement and a 35.15% increase in cognitive engagement. Meanwhile, it also optimizes the classroom structure to a certain extent. The teaching mode has shifted from lecture-based to hybrid, the classroom atmosphere is more harmonious and equal, and the teacher-student intimacy is increasing.