Abstract:

The rapid development of many new technologies, especially digital ones, has led to emergence of digital natives. Those are the people who were born after the 1980s, grew up in a world dominated by technology and are used to using technology in everyday life as an opposite to digital immigrants who had to learn how to use technology. The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to the whole world, out of which perhaps the most notable one is the intensive transition to the virtual world, in both business and private aspects of life. Higher education was no exception in such transition as higher education institutions all around the globe had to adapt their teaching to an online environment and transfer all their teaching into virtual classrooms. Having in mind that most of the current students at higher education level can be considered to be digital natives, a question of usefulness of teaching them topics within the field of business informatics can be raised, especially in the era of COVID-19 pandemic, when, due to a high level of virtual presence, can be presumed that the levels of digital literacy increased. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the perceived usefulness and the results of teaching business informatics to digital native students. In order to fulfil the stated purpose of the paper, the results of two identical surveys, one conducted in January 2019 in normal conditions before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and the other conducted in January 2022 under pandemic settings, will be presented and contrasted. While the respondents of the first survey spent their whole education in physical classrooms, those surveyed in the pandemic conditions spent three semesters as online learners in highly virtual environment. Both surveys have been conducted at the sample of first-year students of Business Economics at the Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The findings of the named two surveys shed some light to the question of possible changes in the perceived usefulness and the results of teaching business informatics to digital natives caused by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

Keywords:

Digital natives, information technology education, education improvement, business informatics, higher education, COVID-19 consequences.