Abstract:

Almost 2 years have passed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and now students have entered universities who graduated from schools in a remote or blended format. Accordingly, they have experience of face-to-face, blended and distance learning in school, but due to pandemic restrictions, they have only blended learning experience at the university so far. This fact suggests that their digital competence and attitudes towards digital educational technologies (DET) will differ from those of students who, before the outbreak of the pandemic, studied only face-to-face and used DET only occasionally.

The purpose of the present study is to compare the characteristics of attitudes towards DET among Russian university students with different experience in learning via distance technologies.

The first part of the present study was conducted before the start of the pandemic (in February - early March 2020) and involved 48 (81% - girls) university psychology students. These students at that time were enrolled in full-time and face-to-face learning format and had little experience of learning through the DET (they used the university LMS as an additional means of education). The second part of the study was carried out more than 1.5 year after the start of the pandemic (in late October - early November 2021) and involved 97 (85% - girls) university psychology students. These students studied in a blended format (most of the classes were in a remote format via MS Teams and LMS, some seminars in psychology were face-to-face).

To determine the attitudes towards DET, the author's questionnaire was used, which includes 4 scales:
1) "General involvement in the use of DET", which characterizes the general interest in DET;
2) "Involvement in the digital space", which reflects the activity of using digital technologies in general (not only for educational purposes);
3) "The use of digital technologies in education", which more specifically reflects the attitude to digital technologies in the educational process;
4) "Digital competence".

In the second part of the study, five additional questions were added to the questionnaire to identify the possible changes of attitudes towards DET after the start of the pandemic. The descriptive statistics methods and Mann–Whitney U-test were used for statistical analysis.

Findings of the study showed that university students with more extensive experience in remote learning, as expected, tend to have higher digital competence, involvement in the digital space and in the use of DET than “face-to-face” students. At the same time, students of both groups note comfort, time saving, and affordability among the advantages of DET, and technical and technological difficulties, psychological problems with motivation and self-organization among their disadvantages.

The obtained data must be taken into account when DET are included in the educational programs for students with different experience in learning via distance technologies.

Keywords:

Digital educational technologies, university students, attitudes towards digital educational technologies, COVID-19 pandemic, remote learning.