Abstract:

For two decades people are being divided into digital natives and digital immigrants. The first group – digital natives – refers to the people who were born surrounded by technology, which means that they are familiar with how to use it in everyday life. The other group – digital immigrants – are people who needed to adapt to technological innovations developed throughout time and learn how to use technology in order to be able to maintain their jobs and ease their everyday life. Nowadays, the vast majority of higher education students are digital natives. However, there are still university courses that teach them how to use technology. One such is the Business Informatics course, which is, among others, held at the Business Economics university program, whose students participated in this study. In that sense, one of the goals of this study is to observe the interests of digital natives students regarding topics covered within the Business Informatics course. Also, in light of current world events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic which empowered the use of technology, one could raise the question if digital natives would lose interest in learning technology-related topics as its use has intensified in recent periods. In that sense, the other goal of this study is to see if the interest in informatics topics decreased over the period of 5 academic years. In order to fulfill the stated goals, this paper presents the results of two identical questionnaires, one conducted in the academic year 2017/2018, and the other conducted in the academic year 2021/2022. Both questionnaires were distributed to university students after the classes have finished and both contained the same Likert scale questions regarding their interest in topics covered in the theoretical and practical part of the Business Informatics course. This paper presents and discusses the study's findings addressing the shift in digital natives' interests in Business Informatics. The results indicate higher interest in topics covered in the practical part of the course in both observed academic years. Also, the results show a decrease in students’ interest in almost all topics in the academic year 2021/2022 compared to 2017/2018, except for topics related to Web sites, networks, and IT governance, which is discussed in more detail in the paper. Finally, the paper provides guidelines for shaping future Business Informatics courses at the university level in order to provide topics that would be more relevant in Business Informatics education for digital natives.

Keywords:

Digital natives, student interests, information technology education, business informatics, higher education.