FACTORS INFLUENCING TEACHERS’ VIEW OF STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IMPORTANCE IN E-TEXTBOOKS

This study presents the result of evaluation of the perception of teachers and their preference for different structural elements (SEs) of e-textbooks as learning materials. The sample of the study consisted of 350 teachers from pre-school, primary and secondary public school in Romania. Study participants were asked to give grades from 1 to 5 (1-not important, 5-very important) regarding the importance of different SEs. The interviewed teachers cover a large area of disciplines corresponding to pre-primary education, primary education, and secondary education, like counseling and guidance, language and communication, mathematics and sciences, people and society, physical education, sport and technology. The independent variables used in this study were the level of ICT knowledge owned by teachers quantified on 4 levels (1-beginner to 4-experienced), seniority in education (1-less than 5 years to 5-over 31 years), participants' residence and gender. Thus, in this study, it was examined if the 4 levels of ICT skills of teachers, participants' residence, gender and seniority in education lead to different results on the visions of individual SE for the digital classroom. The results were obtained by applying the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. Findings indicated that audio elements (I1), video elements (I2), scenario-based interactivity (I3), links to external sources of information (I4), simulations and applets (I5) and educational games are perceived in different ways by different category of teachers. In this study, outcomes confirm that there are significant differences between the perception of teachers who teach language and communication in secondary education as a function of their ICT skills and gender. Moreover, the perception of teachers who teach in primary education was significantly influenced by their ICT skills. Also, results confirm that there are significant differences between perception of male and female teachers who teach technology in secondary education.