Abstract:

Past two years were challenging in terms of acquiring new technical and digital skills in a glimpse of time. Regarding education system, there is a need to adapt to a new generation Z, making the students the centre of their training, leaving the teacher as a tutor or coach of their learning. This is possible to achieve via design thinking, which is a “good practice” of x-learning. The aim of this text is to share the experience with design thinking in online teaching that can shape the digital identity of Slovak university students. The author herself has experienced design thinking workshop for teachers and since then regularly organizes workshops for students. The success (more than 70 % of students consider it suitable method of teaching and recommend it for other academic subjects as well) of incorporating the workshops into educational process is illustrated on the results from two design thinking workshops prepared for students of literature and culture. The presented research was carried out using a questionnaire in Google Forms, which was sent out via email to students who participated in the workshops. The data was processed in the same way as it has built-in automated collection of survey data. Designing thinking is considered a modern, interactive process to understand the needs of the user (in this case a university student), which will teach them to identify alternative problem-solving options. By using this method and under the right guidance of experienced teachers, students are able to create and fulfil the content of their education. One of the school’s tasks is to prepare young people for their future professional lives in an increasingly technological society. Teachers therefore need to have a wide range of new, modern and innovative approaches to teaching. For Slovak universities, this implies the need to provide the premises with the new technical equipment needed to achieve this goal, as even after two years the most departments and faculties are not technically equipped. The whole university education has moved to the online world, and we have experienced so-called emergency remote teaching (ERT). During the course of time, we have moved from ERT to an effective online teaching-learning process. Well-planned online teaching-learning process is meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to an emergency situation. Innovative methods together with modern technologies offer a wide range of the current teaching-learning process.

Keywords:

Digital identity, online educational process, x-learning, Design Thinking, generation Z.