ENGESTRÖM’S ACTIVITY THEORY SYSTEM AS A TOOL FOR THE QUALITY ASSURANCE OF E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

The extensive use of e-learning environments in formal education in combination with the expanding research outcomes from the fields of research methodologies, pedagogics, neuroscience, cognitive research and Information Technology (IT) has revealed an important need of developing a quality assurance model for e-learning environments in formal education. Furthermore, the student’s learning process involves a variety of different parameters that determine their learning outcome and that is the educational tools they use, the e-learning platforms and apps, all the artifacts they test along with their personal skills and knowledge background, the surrounding community and environment. There are yet unanswered questions concerning the successful bridging between all the above parameters when researchers develop a new pedagogical tool such as a new e-learning environment. Due to the importance of following and evaluating the outcome of e-learning environments used by students in formal education it is of great necessity that educational research suggests and tests a quality assurance model when using an e-learning environment. The development and use of a quality and adequacy assurance model, that takes into account all the available research data which are connected to the above factors, provides an additional scientific confirmation of what is already thought to be scientific from an educational point of view. The aim of this paper is to present a scientific quality assurance model in accordance with Engeström’s activity theory system and discuss it as a tool for the quality assurance of e-learning environments in formal education approached from a multidisciplinary point of view.