Abstract:

The use of digital resources in school education plays an important role in the modern world, especially in the context of distance learning. Despite this, the school still remains quite a conservative social institute, where adoption of new technologies faces a number of external and internal barriers. Thus, there may be insufficient material and resource base of the school, lack of additional time and technical support for teachers, as well as personal characteristics of teachers, their internal attitudes and resistance to change, that deter the successful adoption of digital resources in the educational process. The aim of this research is to identify and describe the strategies for the adoption of digital resources in the educational process by Russian school teachers, and also to detect the determinants of differences in their choices of those strategies.

The empirical basis of this study is a randomized controlled trial conducted by researchers of the International Laboratory for Evaluation of Practices and Innovations in Education for the Russian IT company Yandex in the 2018/2019 academic year with 347 Russian schools participated in the study. During the 25 weeks, the experimental group of 165 teachers from these schools was recommended to use the digital service named Yandex.Textbook, which provides individualized digital home tasks in Mathematics and Russian language with automated checking.

We analyzed the average weekly number of home tasks given by every teacher to identify their strategies for using Yandex.Textbook. With the help of time series cluster analysis, there were identified three different strategies for using digital resources. The first one presents a situation where a teacher uses Yandex.Textbook from the very beginning with pauses during school holidays. The second strategy is typical for those teachers who join the experiment later and start with a bigger amount of home tasks than the first ones, in order to compensate for the lost time. The third strategy is usual for teachers who use Yandex.Textbook only once or twice, in spite of recommendations.

Further analysis with the use of multinomial regression showed that relationship of teachers’ characteristics and their strategy choice. Those teachers who are more likely to choose the 2nd strategy (“delayed start”) tend to have a bigger working experience and a lower education level than the teachers that realized the 1st strategy. At the same time, there was no significant relationship between strategy choice and personal ICT and user experience. Besides, chances for choosing the 3rd strategy (“sporadic use”), as well as the 2nd one, are higher for teachers in schools where principals consider the lack of computers with the Internet connection as a significant obstacle to the use of new technologies.

This research shows how the external and internal barriers of Russian school teachers determine the dynamics of digital resource adoption in the educational process. These results allow us to identify teachers who may need additional support for the further integration of digital resources. This is an important result for education policymakers and school principals who plan to introduce new digital learning resources into practice.

Keywords:

EdTech, teaching strategies, user experiences, barriers for innovations, digital learning resources.