Abstract:

Today, a young person needs to acquire the set of digital competences to be able to enter the labour market without the risk of exclusion. The European Commission has recognized the importance of digital skills by proclaiming them to be one of the eight key competencies for the 21st century. This was furthermore supported with the development of The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens in order to empower the necessity of the labour market for the digitally skilled workers. However, there was a gap between the published Framework and the methodology including the standards and the indicators aimed for the educational institutions to conduct the evaluation and the accreditation of the digital competences of their students. With this respect, a new cloud-based teaching methodologies and services that enable the acquisition of digital competences in primary and secondary schools in Europe were developed as a part of a Horizon 2020 project (hereafter referred to as CRISS) during 2017 and 2018. The overall objective of the CRISS project is to develop and pilot, with more than 490 schools including 25.400 students and 2.290 teachers around Europe, a flexible, scalable and cost-effective cloud-based digital learning ecosystem to deliver a user-driven and adaptive technological solutions that allow the guided acquisition, evaluation and certification of digital competences in primary and secondary education (students and teachers) also scalable to other educational levels.

The aim of this paper is to develop an instrument to assess the successful deployment of such ecosystem in primary and secondary schools (hereinafter referred to as CRISS instrument) based on the well-known DeLone & McLean’s IS Success Model (D&M Model). To date, the D&M Model (1992) is one of the most cited models (as shown in Petter, DeLone, and McLean, 2008) and served as a reference point for many other models that tried to encompass the IS success. Its six basic constructs (Information Quality, System Quality, Service Quality, Use, User Satisfaction and Net Impact) constitute a starting point in the CRISS instrument development being further operationalized based on the existing measures, as well as on the set of completely new target-specific measures.

In this paper we present the steps typical for the instrument development in IS (Straub, Boudreau, & Gefen, 2004), as well as the final instruments (for teachers and students) ready for the field test. The three-stage process involves (Moore and Benbasat, 1991): item creation, scale development and instrument testing. The pool of items is created for each construct of the model by overviewing the relevant literature and using focus group. The second stage, scale development, includes two rounds of the Q-sorting technique conducted by the experts in digital competence acquisition and online learning. The items are sorted within the constructs to eliminate any ambiguous or poorly formulated items. The last stage in this process is the pilot test of the instrument with the aim to get the initial indication of the scale reliability and to ensure that the instrument items are clear and concise.

We conclude the paper with further research recommendations that involve the field test of the instrument on a large sample of teachers and students to ensure the successful implementation and deployment of CRISS platform and to test the underlying CRISS Success Model.

Keywords:

Digital competences, IS success model, D&M model, assessment, acquisition.