Abstract:

Digital technologies are an integral part of our society today. They affect all aspects of society, as well as learning, teaching and research, giving the potential for innovation, for better and greater development of skills needed for the labour market. They can also enrich the learning experience, bring new and innovative teaching and learning opportunities, improve the quality of the educational process and better achieve learning outcomes. Taking into account this and need to adapt teaching and learning to be relevant to needs of today’s society, teachers are facing a great challenge. They are expected somehow at once have competencies in use of new technologies, to be able to apply them into their teaching and to introduce new teaching methods. Especially now with the pandemic they are forced to start using digital technologies over the night to ensure the continuation of teaching and learning.
In research done for the doctoral thesis main objective was to investigate and define the importance and role of digital competencies as the factor for e-learning acceptance and its integration into e-learning process. The research consisted of theoretical part with an extensive review of the professional literature and research part, conducted in support of theoretical part, which was done as an online survey aimed at the teachers of the University of Zagreb.
The one of the premises in the research was that teachers have positive attitude towards ICT and e-learning implementation in the educational process. The research confirmed that teachers’ attitude towards e-learning can greatly influence its adoption and integration into educational process. There are several factors influencing teachers’ attitude for e-learning implementation: personal, institutional, cultural and technical. While personal factors depend on a person itself, others cannot be controlled by teachers. Among personal factors that significantly influence teachers’ attitude is their knowledge and skills in use of ICT. Those who have some knowledge how to use and implement ICT into educational process are much more open to try to implement new things into their teaching. Teaching experience is one more important factor because integration of ICT into educational process does not means necessary improvement of the quality of educational process. The research results showed that teachers in higher education have positive attitude towards application of ICT and e-learning into educational process. High number of them found that e-learning is important for education quality improvement. Research also looked into correlation between teachers’ attitude towards e-learning and situation at their institution on e-learning and infrastructure at their institution. Although high number of teachers use e-learning in their teaching yet most of them is using it on the basic level, they find that their efforts in teaching are not awarded and that they lack training in application of e-learning into educational process. In this paper the results of research will presented along with possible directions how to increase the teachers’ attitude towards e-learning and to increase their digital competencies so that use of e-learning leads to education quality improvement.

Keywords:

e-learning, teachers’ attitude, digital competencies, higher education