Application of ARCS Model for a Blended Teaching Methodologies: A Study of Students’ Motivation amid the COVID-19

INTRODUCTION: A well-developed course in accordance with sound instructional design principles and successfully delivered multiple times in a traditional face-to-face classroom mode failed to stimulate students’ motivation to learn in an online delivery mode amidst the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper contributes by presenting a case study on the application of ARCS models to enhance efficacy of an online course and students engagement. OBJECTIVES: A motivational framework based on the processes outlined in the ARCS model, implemented, and tested using a single-case study. METHODS: A cohort of seventy-five undergraduate students aged between 24 to 29 years from different program majors enrolled in a six-week mandatory IT in Business course participated in this research. A blend of a traditional flipped classroom and gamified teaching methodologies were applied in alignment with the ARCS model’s four motivational factors: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction, associated process, and strategies. Before, during, and after treatment surveys based on the original Instructional Material Motivation Survey (IMMS) with 36 questions were conducted to determine the effectiveness of blended teaching methodologies (BTM) on students’ motivation. RESULTS: The BTM based on the ARCS model, process, and strategies have enhanced and/or sustained students’ motivation and kept the subject interesting in an online environment, and ultimately improved their learning. CONCLUSION: An adaptive implementation of BTM aligned with ARCS models, process, and associated strategies can enable the enhancement and/or sustainability of students’ motivation. The lecturers or designer should identify the right combination of BTM and activities through iterative motivational feedback of the students during course delivery.


Introduction
The year 2020 is well known for its disastrous COVID-19 outbreak and its global impact on every aspect of human life. In education, it has created significant challenges for the global education community. It is a test of organisational agility [1], where institutes initially focused on shifting their program delivery to online environments, not necessarily on online pedagogy [2]. Researchers have conducted studies to analyse the responses taken by different education providers globally, with solutions varying from no response through to an online offering [2] [3].
In the mid of March 2020, Ajman University had to suspend our regular face-to-face classes under the emergency policy by the UAE government. In these unfamiliar circumstances, there was uncertainty and disparity between what to teach, how to teach, where to teach, how to assess and grade, the workload of lecturers and students, the teaching environment, and the implications for education equity [4]. The University faced several challenges under the newly introduced online policies included: the weakness of the e-learning infrastructure, the lack of lecturers' experiences in conducting online classes, the complex environment at lecturers' and students' homes, and so forth.
Out of these challenges, one of the key academic challenges, our well-developed courses prepared in accordance to sound instructional design principles and successfully delivered multiple times in a traditional faceto-face classroom environment, failed to stimulate students' motivation to learn in an online delivery mode. A fundamental question of, "How to motivate students in an online environment?" and "How to have a sustainable motivation throughout our courses?" To answer the above challenges and questions, in this paper we have contributed by presenting a single case study on the application of ARCS model [12] in enhancing the efficacy of an online course by increasing the students' engagement, motivation and the content relevance.
We begin with a literature review that formed the basis of this study in Section 2. Section 3 then describes the research methodology. We then describe the findings and discussion in Section 4. Finally, we provide the conclusion, examine the study's ramifications, limitations and explores potential areas for future research in Section 5 and 6.

Literature Review
The aspiration to thrive in each educational context may not come from the instruction itself but from long range goals, institutional requirements, or many other sources [5]. Studies have attributed students' success with the effectiveness of instructional design and extrinsic rewards, such as a certificate, advancement to a higher grade or position, or avoidance of termination even they do not have a desire to learn [6] [7]. Conversely, motivational design was associated with the intrinsic values, making the learning process more interesting and relevant to students' past, present and the future [8] [9]. A typical learning environment with sound instructional design practices might result in an effective course or program, but without considering the motivational design aspects, students cannot be motivated for a sustainable learning. Students, if given an option might try to avoid such effective courses unless necessary [10].
Exploration of such questions leads to considering holistic models such as the time-continuum model [11], and Keller's ARCS model [12]. For this study, we followed the approach of the latter. The ARCS model represents four categories of motivational factors; attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. The model includes sets of motivational enhancement strategies and a motivational design process with application to any instructional design models [12]. The ARCS model with its basis in the macrotheory of motivation and performance [5] [13] and grounded from the expectancy-value theory [14] has been validated from various aspects in many studies [15] [16].
As a key factor in the ARCS model, attention is about taking notice of something or someone interesting or important in the educational delivery context. It is mainly concerned with getting the attention of the students and more importantly sustaining attention of the students during the instructional process [12]. Relevance, as a second factor is associated to the degree to which something is related or useful to what is being talked about or something taught in the educational delivery context, not necessarily coming from the content itself [12]. The opportunities provided to students through various activities and assessments might satisfy their needs during the time of instruction and generate the feeling of relevance. The third factor, confidence, is the quality of being certain about one's abilities. It can influence a student's persistence and accomplishment [12]. Satisfaction, as a last factor is about a pleasant feeling that someone gets when they achieve what they wanted. It includes research and practices that help make people feel good about their accomplishments [12].
Along with the four motivational categories the ARCS model provides a systematic design process (also known as motivational design) that can be used with traditional instructional design and development models [12]. The four stages of this motivational design process include: define, design, develop and evaluate. The define stage with three steps includes: 1) classify the motivational problem, proceed only if the problem is one of improving the motivation appeal of instruction for a given audience, 2) perform audience analysis to identify motivational level of the audience, 3) prepare motivational objectives based on identified motivational level of step 2. During the design stage, the designer or the teacher should identify a list of potential motivational strategies for each of the objectives. In the development stage, the designer or the teachers are required to create customized materials and integrate them into the instruction. This usually requires revision of the instructional materials to ensure continuity and internal consistency [12]. During the last stage, it is important to base the evaluation of the materials on motivational consequences as well as course learning outcomes. Keller [12] [17] has presented twelve subcategories along with twenty-two strategies associated with the four factors of the ARCS model, guiding the innovative designers and the teachers to customize their course material and making the learning process more interesting and relevant for the students.
Past studies have applied the ARCS model in instructional design models by combining it with a flippedclassroom approach [18] to determine the effect on the achievements, motivation, and self-sufficiency of the students [19]. These studies have found a flipped classroom as a positive contributor towards enhancing the motivation and self-sufficiency of the students. In a flipped-classroom instructional design model, the lecturer provides resources to the students for reading before class and then uses class time to engage students in various learning activities such as discussions on lecture specific topics, and collaboration tasks among peers [20].
Moreover, Toussaint and Brown [21] in their study demonstrated how to increase students' motivation in mathematics using the ARCS model and concepts of gamification [22] to design Serious Games for mathematics learning. In another study of nearly graduated students of architecture, lack in the use of use of innovative teaching materials such as building simulation performance tools were identified as key reasons for students' demotivation as they felt they could not able to compete with other professional [23]. It was suggested to universities develop building simulation performance tools to enhance the student's motivation. In a different context, ARCS model was also applied in combination with flipped classroom approach to determine the effect on the achievements, motivation and self-sufficiency of the students [19] [24]. These studies have found flipped classroom as a positive contributor towards enhancing the motivation and selfsufficiency of the participating students.
For this study, we have used the ARCS model, process, and strategies, blending it with traditional, flipped classroom and gamified teaching methodologies (from here now referred to as blended teaching methods -BTM) to deliver an online course. This paper aims to present a method to enhance and/or sustain students' motivation by systematically aligning the teaching resources of a selected course based on the three-staged students' feedback analysis (before-course, during-course, and after-course).
The hypothesis for this study is: • H1: ARCS model and strategies positively affect an online course delivery through BTM to enhance and/or sustain students' motivation o H1a: ARCS model and strategies positively affect an online course delivery through traditional teaching method with a difference in the students' motivation o H1b: ARCS model and strategies positively affect an online course delivery through gamified flipped classroom teaching method with a difference in the students' motivation o H1c: ARCS model and strategies positively affect an online course delivery through BTM with a difference in the students' motivation

Methodology
We chose a mandatory IT in Business course to cover participants from a broad range of educational programs. This was the convenience sampling with the intention for it to be representative. Like [25], the sample selected with a concern to uncover a range of students in various programs experience unconventional learning approaches.
The participants for this study were 75 undergraduate students aged between 24 and 29 from different educational programs. We divided these participants into two classes taught by the same IT lecturer. Out of these, 35 were female and 40 were male students. The 26 participants were from Accounting and Finance programs, 17 from IT/IS programs, 28 from management programs, and four from the marketing programs. These participants represented the overall diversity in the university, except EAI Endorsed Transactions on e-Learning 02 2021 -04 2021 | Volume 7 | Issue 21 | e2 that there were no participants from groups with special needs.
The course represented three credit hours with four twohour lectures per week for six weeks. We divided the delivery of the course into two phases. In Phase 1 (first three weeks), we delivered two lectures each week through a traditional teaching method using the Blackboard Collaborate and Moodle. At the end of each of the lectures, dedicated questions and answers time was provided to the students. In Phase 2 (last three weeks), we used a gamified flipped classroom teaching method for the same participants using the same tools above, followed by inclassroom tasks and activities. Fig. 2 presents a BTM along with the assessments. A customised version of the Instructional Material Motivational Survey -IMMS (Appendix A) measured students' motivation [12] [26], specifically learners' reactions to the motivational features of instructional material in terms of attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction, and overall motivation. These questions were aligned with tools and techniques of flipped classroom and gamified teaching methodologies applied for this study. Internal consistency estimates for the IMMS total score and subscales are between 0.81 to 0.96 [27]. The IMMS used all 36 items from Keller's original 36 items, with twelve items for attention, nine for confidence, nine for relevance, and six for satisfaction. A five-point Likert-scale was used with a response choice of 1 (not true), 2 (slightly true), 3 (moderately true), 4 (mostly true), and 5 (very true). The responses were collected from the students at three stages of delivery: before-course, during-course, and after-course. We performed the quantitative analysis using SPSS data analytical tool and discussed in the next section.

Findings and Discussion
For this study, we received 125 online survey responses from 75 students before-course, during-course, and aftercourse delivery. To decrease the chance of missing data,

Before
During AFTER the Moodle learning management system was used to collect data from the enrolled students using a web-based questionnaire and set the required option for all the 36 questions (Appendix A). The before-course responses were 35 out of 75 (total population), with a response rate of 47%. The during-course responses were 46 out of 75, with a response rate of 61%. For the after-course, 44 students responded with a response rate of 59%. The sum of average scores against each of the variables was then calculated and used to perform a test of normality and a paired t-test to their compared means.
To test the hypothesis that the results of before-course (M=2.57, SD=1.232), during-course (M=3.07, SD=0.364), and after-course (M= 3.07, SD= 0.289) were equal, we performed a paired t-test. Before conducting further analysis, we examined the assumption of normality distributed among different scores. The assumptions considered satisfied, as the skew and kurtosis level are estimated at -0.221 and -0.793, respectively, which is less than the maximum allowable values for a t-test (with skew < |2.0| and kurtosis <|9.0|) [13]. For H1a, the null hypothesis of equal means between before-course and during-course rejected, t(35)=-2.314, p<0.05. Conversely, for H1b, the null hypothesis of equal means between during-course and after-course accepted, t(35)= -0.154, p>0.05. The null hypothesis for H1c, with the equal means between before-course and after-course, was rejected, t(35)=-2.381, P<0.05. Table 1 presents the adjusted 95% confidence intervals of the three pairs along with mean and standard deviations. Before the course delivery, the students were very concerned and demotivated about the online mode of delivery and assessments. This was because of unfamiliarity with the e-learning education paradigm, weakness of the e-learning infrastructure, the complex environment at lecturers' and students' homes. Based on the before-course students' evaluation, in Phase 1, the lecturer selected customised strategies aligned with the ARCS model such as Blackboard Collaborate polling for student attention, taking examples from students' areas during lecture delivery to promote relevance, clearly identifying the rubrics for online assessment and publishing it on Moodle to boost students' confidence, and real-time projects based on students' choices with guidelines for the satisfaction. Because of these strategies, students' motivation shown visible improvement in terms of motivation (pair 1).
At the end of Phase 1, the same students went through during-course evaluation to assess students' motivation. There was a significant improvement in the students' motivation in terms of attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. As a result, in Phase 2, the lecturer has used a distinct set of customised strategies aligned with the ARCS model to sustain students' motivation. This included using gamification tools for in-class MCQ assessments using the Kahoot and/or the Socrative tools for attention, scenariobased tasks during flipped classroom group breakout sessions to encourage relevance, multiple gamified assessments, and the selection of the best attempts towards final grading to boost confidence, and immediate feedback during the flipped classroom session for formal assessments. This sustained students' motivation is clear from pair 2 in Table 1.
At the end of the course delivery, the lecturer evaluated the students one last time to assess if the blended delivery (Phase 1 + Phase 2) of the course has positively affected the overall students' motivation. The overall effect of BTM was positive on the students' motivation (pair 3). Fig. 4 illustrates the four categories of ARCS motivational factors and systematic alignment based on the analysis of the students' motivation before-course, during-course, and after course delivery.

Conclusion
As a lecturer or designer, if motivational challenges or deficiencies arise, as it did in our study because of the COVID-19 outbreak, then it is necessary to first plan a motivational approach that will overcome these problems [28]. Students' motivation requires enhancement only when they are de-motivated [27]. However, if students' overall motivation is already high, then the lecturer or designer only requires sustaining students' motivation by using variety in teaching approaches [28] rather than exposing them to any unnecessary enhancement motivational tactics [12] [26]. In this study, we have shown the blended use of traditional, flipped classroom and gamified teaching methodologies in alignment with the ARCS model, process, and strategies with an adaptive implementation based on students' feedback beforecourse, during-course, and after-course delivery.
Our recommendations for the lecturer or designer are to consider applying the BTM emphasising on relevance of the content delivered based on students' background. Also, they should consider using the BTM by applying both the theorectical and practical components for their courses. In addition, the lecturer or designer should adapt to the situation to tryout different weightage of flipped, gamification, and traditional activities and assessments to verify and validate the efficacy of their BTM.
Based on the analysis of 125 responses collected from 75 students during three stages of the course delivery (before-course, during-course, and after-course), we conclude that an adaptive implementation of BTM aligned with ARCS models, process, and associated strategies can enable the enhancement and/or sustainability of students' motivation. The lecturers or designer should identify the right combination of BTM and activities through iterative motivational feedback of the students during course delivery.

Limitations and Future Work
The limitation of this paper is its convenient sampling through enrolled undergraduate students of the Business in IT course. It does not consider different courses, programs, colleges, institutes, and educational levels. As a result, the authors cannot generalise the findings of this paper to other research contexts.
Future work will focus on applying the recommendations presented in this paper to enhance courses in different programs in other colleges and educational levels. Besides, we are also planning to apply virtual reality technology in a project management course by applying the same BTM as followed in this paper. This will further support investigating the effects of BTM on the motivation of students to developing their skills in areas other than IT in Business.  There were examples that showed me how this course could be important to people RELE3 Completing flipped classroom activities during the sessions were important to me RELE4 The content of this course is relevant to my interests RELE5 There are explanations or examples of how people use the knowledge in this course RELE6 The content and style of assessments used in this course convey the impression that its content is worth knowing RELE7 This course was not relevant to my needs because I already knew most of it RELE8 I could relate the content of this course to things I have seen, done or thought about in my own life RELE9 The content of this course will be useful to me CONF1 When I first looked at course, I had the impression that it would be easy for me CONF2 The course was more difficult to understand than I would like for it to be CONF3 After reading the introductory information, I felt confident that I knew what I was supposed to learn from this course CONF4 Many of the slides had so much information that it was hard to pick out and remember the important points CONF5 As I worked on this course, I was confident that I could learn the content

CONF6
The activities and assessments in this course were too difficult CONF7 After working on this course for a while, I was confident that I would be able to pass all course related assessments CONF8 I could not really understand quite a bit of the material in this course CONF9 The good organisation of the content helped me be confident that I would learn this material

SAT1
Completing the activities in this course gave me a satisfying feeling of accomplishment SAT2 I enjoyed this course so much that I would like to know more about this topic SAT3 I really enjoyed studying this course

SAT4
The feedback after the assessments, or of other comments in this course, helped me feel rewarded for my effort SAT5 If felt good to successfully complete this course SAT6 It was a pleasure to work on such a well-designed course