Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives: Learning Business Informatics at Higher Educational Level

Suša Dalia
Additional contact information
Suša Dalia: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Dalia Suša Vugec ()

Business Systems Research, 2014, vol. 5, issue 2, 84-96

Abstract: Background: The term digital natives refer to those born since the 1980s and have been growing up surrounded by technology. On the other hand, digital immigrants are born before 1980s and learned how to use technology later in life. Objectives: Goal of the paper is to explore attitudes of digital native students on the course of Business Informatics at higher educational institutions (HEIs), and to compare them with attitudes of digital immigrants. Methods/Approach: The survey was conducted in 2014 using the sample of first-year Business Informatics students from the Faculty of Economics and Business in Zagreb, Croatia. Results were compared with a research conducted in 1998. Results: In comparison to an earlier research, digital natives perceive their level of competency in the subject of Business Informatics before teaching practices much higher compared to digital immigrants. However, there is still an increase in digital native students’ level of competency in the subject before and after teaching practices. Conclusions: The research confirms a shift from digital immigrants to digital natives who show high level of interest for Business Informatics course topics and find its utility very high. However, constant improvement of delivering knowledge is needed in order to keep these high levels.

Keywords: digital natives; digital immigrants; information technology education; education improvement; business informatics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/bsrj-2014-0012 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bit:bsrysr:v:5:y:2014:i:2:p:84-96

DOI: 10.2478/bsrj-2014-0012

Access Statistics for this article

Business Systems Research is currently edited by Mirjana Pejić Bach

More articles in Business Systems Research from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().