Abstract
We welcome digital natives to our university assuming they are competent computer and internet users. However, testing their computer skills at the beginning of the course revealed that they are not as highly skilled as was initially expected. The majority of students had surprisingly never heard of the massive open online courses that have been challenging higher education in recent years. Moreover, a lot of students do not use freely accessible learning resources on the web. Collecting data from Eurostat statistics raises an interesting issue – more and more EU households are getting broadband internet access and internet penetration is not only following users that have accessed the internet once in the last 3 months, but users that access the internet daily. It would be expected that individuals, especially those aged under 30, are highly computer and internet literate, but the data analysis revealed otherwise. Not only students included in the research presented in the empirical part of this paper, but also an average young internet user of one of the 28 EU countries. Using Facebook and the first Google search result is not enough anymore.
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Notes
- 1.
ICILS covers EU countries: Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia and non-EU countries: Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, SAR, Republic of Korea, Norway, Russian federation, Switzerland and Turkey [5].
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E-skills are measured on three levels – low level at which individuals ticked 1 or 2 computer/internet activities, medium level with 3 or 4 computer/internet activities and high level with 5 or 6 computer/internet activities.
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M11 – an average number of activities for 2011, M13 – an average number of activities for 2014.
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Slovenia has only 2 mio of citizens. The Academic Research Network – ARNES (www.arnes.si) is offering the MOOC about Secure Internet usage.
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A student that accomplished general upper-secondary education can be enrolled in PDP and in UDP. Students that come from technical or vocational upper-secondary schools can be enrolled only in PDP. If these students passed an additional exam of one of the external examination (Matura) subjects they can be enrolled in the UDP too.
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The pedagogical process in the undergraduate programmes is organised in quarters – students attend 2–3 courses in each quarter. After the quarter they have the quarter’s exams. In the 1st year all courses are compulsory.
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The survey was launched at the beginning of the course.
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ECDL – European Computer Driving License (http://www.ecdl.com/).
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Florjančič, V. (2015). The Information Society, a Challenge for Business Students?. In: Uden, L., Liberona, D., Welzer, T. (eds) Learning Technology for Education in Cloud. LTEC 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 533. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22629-3_14
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