Abstract:

Rapid diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in all professional and personal areas require digital maturity of schools. The European Commission has recognized the significance of this concept and, among all, helped financing a project in Croatia named “e-Schools: Establishing a System for Developing Digitally Mature Schools (pilot project)”. In this project, a Framework for Digitally Mature Schools (FDMS) has been developed. In order to assess digital maturity of schools and to monitor their progress through the e-Schools project, an adequate instrument, comprising the FDMS postulates, had to be developed also.

The aim of this paper is to describe how this instrument was developed. It turned out that the most appropriate instrument to be used here was a rubric. A rubric is usually used in performance evaluation and includes descriptions of levels of performance quality on the selected criteria. There are five levels of digital maturity of schools defined in the FDMS, so for each of the criteria used in the rubric, five descriptors (describing the expected performance at a certain level) had to be defined. The necessary exactness of each descriptor and exactness in assessing the level of digital maturity of a school was accomplished by the use of mathematical (propositional) logic. At the very end, to obtain the level of digital maturity of each school, the Taxicab metrics was used as a part of this instrument. As far as the knowledge of the authors go, this is the first instrument of that kind, which is based on the mathematical modeling mentioned here.

Keywords:

Digital maturity, framework, instrument.