Investigating high school students' perception about digital comics creation in the classroom

The present study focuses on high school students' acceptance of digital comics creation (DCC) in classroom learning and aims at identifying the factors that affect it. The DCC is a modern ICT activity, which combines the popular and familiar to students medium of comics with the computers. The research model used to explain the students' preference for DCC is based on the technology acceptance model. A partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and examine our research model and corresponding hypotheses. The results confirm the acceptance of the model and show that students' preference for DCC is directly influenced by perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Among them, the perceived enjoyment is the stronger influencing factor. Digital comics creation self-efficacy was a significant indirect factor of students' preference for DCC through perceived ease of use. It is important that teachers take these into consideration and incorporate ICT activities that students enjoy, perceive them as useful and easy to use in order to capture their interest. Teachers should also enhance students' self-efficacy when providing them with ICT systems. Further relationships among the aforementioned factors and future research directions are also discussed.