Mitigating the Urban-rural Digital Divide: A Dual Scaffolding-embedded Mobile Augmented Reality Learning Approach in the Post COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Mitigating the digital divide is essential for the sustainable development of education. To provide distance access which ensures equality in education for both urban and rural students, online learning has been emphasized in the post COVID-19 period. However, some challenges to total online learning have been described, such as isolation and the lack of in-time interaction due to the separation between teachers and students. The mobile augmented reality (AR) learning approach has the potential to combine real-world and online objects to promote interaction in total online learning. However, researchers have found that teachers and students might feel frustrated while handling too much information to deal with complex tasks in AR learning without appropriate scaffolding, which might reinforce the digital divide. Therefore, there is a need to propose a dual scaffolding-embedded AR learning approach to mitigate the urban-rural digital divide rather than a single form of scaffolding for either teachers or students. A quasi-experiment was conducted by recruiting 173 sixth-grade students from four classes of urban and rural schools in southern China. The longitudinal results showed that the proposed approach effectively improved both urban and rural students’ learning achievement, higher-order cognition, and self-efficacy. The comparison of the students’ learning outcomes indicated that it was helpful to mitigate the digital divide between rural and urban students through the proposed approach. These findings provide insights for school administrators to provide relational and suitable scaffolding-embedded mobile AR learning to support total online education for mitigating the urban and rural digital divide in the post COVID-19 period.

Keywords

• digital divide
• mobile
• augmented reality
• scaffolding
• outcomes