Developing Musical Creativity Through Activity Theory in an Online Learning Environment

Abstract

An online general education platform, e-Holistic (e-HO), was developed to support digital learning. Following Burnard's (2007) adoption of Activity Theory (AT) in designing music education to galvanize learners' creativity, the authors' study extended her theoretical framework through a hypothetical model they designed. From AT, this article investigates a number of elements—musical activities (tools), e-HO (community), emotional arousal (object), and musical creativity (outcome). Through the operation of the AT system, 733 students immersed in musical activities in e-HO were able to compose music even without any musical background. The purpose of this article is to report how an e-HO online activity helps arouse students' emotions and inspire their musical creativity. The structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicates that all research hypotheses were supported, and the musical activities on e-HO predicted 71.6% of students' self-assessed musical creativity. Finally, the implications of the authors' findings are reported for the future development of online musical education.