Abstract:

‘Digital natives’ is the term which refers to the people born into the digitally advanced world. Since they grew up surrounded by technology, they are used to it and use it naturally, without having to specifically learn how. However, different people, including digital natives, can have different attitudes towards using and learning different information-communication technologies (ICTs). In that sense, and in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, which shifted the lives of people in the virtual settings, there is a possibility of technology saturation among people, which needs to be explored. Hence, there are two primary goals of this paper:
(i) it aims to investigate the attitudes of digital natives towards ICT before and after their first semester of their university studies; and
(ii) it seeks to provide an answer to the question if teaching business informatics alongside with other business economics courses in a virtual environment for a semester can improve the levels of digital literacy of students who are digital natives.

The research data for this study is drawn from two surveys, one of which has been conducted at the beginning of the semester in October 2021, and the other one which has been conducted at the end of the semester in January 2022 on a sample the first-year students of the Business Economics programme at the university level. The findings of the study regarding the shift in the attitudes of digital natives towards ICT as well as the increase in the levels of their digital literacy are presented within this paper. In addition, it is investigated weather there is a statistically significant differences between the results before and after online teaching at the university level.

Keywords:

Digital natives, digital literacy, information technology education, business informatics, higher education.