Abstract:

In today educational contexts the Digital Skills of students and teachers play a key role. These skills are even more important in a distance education environment where the uses of ICT are present not only to access digital information resources but also in the overall learning and teaching process. Consequently, it is important to identify the information behaviour and engagement with technology of students and faculty. The main objective of our study is to understand the particularities of technology engagement and information environment in an online teaching context. We are interested in knowing the individual patterns of interaction with digital information resources and to what extent do students and faculty take advantage of the information services provided by the university. To do that we use the Digital Visitors and Residents framework. This framework has been applied to study the digital engagement of students and teachers in different countries. Our project is part of this international research. This theoretical framework argues that one person’s context, situation or motivations explains better her digital behaviour than other factors like, for instance, the age of that person. One person has a visitor behaviour when he uses digital technologies for a specific purpose but just as tool. One person has a resident behaviour when he uses digital technologies as a way of life and his activity on the digital landscape is continuous and with interaction with others. We present the results of an extensive qualitative study where we take in-depth interviews (N=34) to students and faculties of an online university. The people interviewed constitute a purposive sample, which was selected considering two main criteria: knowledge areas in our university, formative stage for students or instructional role for teachers. Apart from confirming the Digital Visitors and Residents framework tenets, our findings provide interesting information to help universities improving the way they provide information resources to students and teachers, or what factors are important to have in mind when designing a digital skills training in the university context.

Keywords:

ICT skill, digital literacy, information behaviour.