Teachers’ Digital Competencies for e-Learning Application in Higher Education

Abstract

New technologies bring new opportunities for teaching and learning, asking the teacher to keep up with time and technology and to try out new methods and apply them in a proper and high-quality way in the educational process. But with a growing number of tools and technologies, teachers often lose the battle because they cannot keep track with all the news, inform themselves about them and figure out how to integrate them into the educational process. Johannesen and Eide (2000) point out that the application of information and communication technologies in the education process needs to be carefully planned and devised to be set in the pedagogical context. Teachers are expected to have good pedagogical knowledge and to know how to integrate new technology into teaching. But technology brings new levels of complexity and demands new knowledge and skills. It is primarily upon teachers to realize what kind of digital competencies they have and how much training do they need in order to be efficient in e-learning implementation into educational process. In this research it was investigated what is the attitude of the teachers at the University of Zagreb toward e-learning and what digital competencies they need to be able to apply e-learning into their teaching. Results showed that teachers have a positive attitude towards ICT and e-learning application in educational process, yet they need support and training to use new technologies in a more innovative and efficient way.