Enhancing university students' creative confidence, learning motivation, and team creative performance in design thinking using a digital visual collaborative environment

The pedagogy of design thinking (DT) is increasingly being used to promote creative problem-solving in higher education. The DT approach traditionally relies heavily on face-to-face collaboration to address ‘wicked’ challenges. However, technological advances have enabled the digitization of design collaboration to support DT co-creation. This study compares students' creative confidence, learning motivation, and team creative performance in digital visual collaboration (DVC) with traditional face-to-face collaboration in DT activities. Mixed quasi-experimental pre-post surveys were used as the quantitative method, and an open-ended questionnaire was used as the qualitative method. The results indicate that (1). DT pedagogy positively affected students' creative confidence in both groups. Nevertheless, the experimental group significantly improved more than the comparison group. (2). The experimental group also showed better learning motivation and perceived competence than students in the comparison group. (3). Finally, students performed significantly better on design projects during DVC than those who collaborated face-to-face. Most importantly, students' qualitative responses suggest that digital visual collaboration platforms can be a productive environment to support DT projects.