Abstract:

Nowadays, technology advances at a breakneck pace, and new audiences readily follow technical advancements. In that direction, the term digital natives has been coined to describe people which have been born into technologically advanced world and were growing up surrounded by modern technology. Just as the educational system was starting to understand the growing value of changing its instructional practices to address the special needs of such generations, the world has found itself locked down by the appearance of COVID-19 pandemic. In that context, higher education institutions (HEI) worldwide had to transfer their teaching in an online world, assuming adequate levels of digital literacy among digital natives. Usually, digital natives can be roughly categorized into two generations, being: millennials and generation Z. Although both belong to population of digital natives, named two generations have their differences, one of which could be the level of digital literacy at the beginning of their HEI journey. In that sense, this paper aims to investigate the levels of digital literacy of students of the first year of Business Economics at the university level and to shed some light on the differences between millennials and generation Z. In order to achieve stated goal of the paper, the results of two identical surveys are going to be presented and compared, one of which has been carried out in 2014 on the population of millennials in normal conditions, and the other one carried out in 2020 on the population of generation Z in the pandemic conditions. While surveyed millennials studied in physical classrooms during their whole education, surveyed generation Z enrolled their first HEI year after a semester of distance learning during their final high school year. Moreover, this paper also addresses the biggest issues students of the first year of Business Economics belonging to the generation Z population have been facing in distance learning during their studies.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, digital natives, millennials, generation Z, COVID-19, distance learning.