Digital Education Ecosystems and 21st Century ICT Skill Sets

• Autor(a) principal: Mairo Morais Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/135667
• topic: Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias; Other engineering and technologies

In internet-driven societies, a large portion of learning is now accomplished online through the aid of digital education ecosystems. These solutions to contemporary problems should, by necessity, respond to the need to foment 21st century skills, such as information, communication and technology (ICT). The digital competencies embedded in ICT skill sets are crucial to society as a whole. Furthermore, they are even more vital to today's students, as rapid advances in technology, globalization and internationalization have given birth to a multitude of changes in the economy and labor markets - both of which suddenly require new competencies that were not needed in the recent past. To perform our study, we drew the base literature from the "European Commission's Digital Competence Framework for Citizens' ' to determine what shapes ICT skill sets, as well as with which specific competencies students should be fostered by the leading digital education ecosystems. Then, we contrasted this framework with the perceived opinion of one hundred and sixty educators who answered our online questionnaire. Our procedural methodology was based on a quantitative approach using a five-point Likert scale to measure the perceived performance of the digital ecosystems (namely, Microsoft 365, Google for Education and others), against twenty-one different competencies that are distributed in the five areas that shape the framework. In addition, to sort out the level of digital proficiency of the educators, which could have an impact on how one perceives the digital education ecosystem he or she is most familiar with, participants were asked to self-assess their digital aptitude. The literature for the self-assessment was obtained from the European Commission's Digital Competence Framework for Educators. In our analysis, we used two statistical methods, One-Way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis, to determine the impact the different digital ecosystems have on promoting the much-needed ICT skills for students. Consequently, our findings indicate that the digital ecosystems perform equally well to the need of promoting such competencies; therefore, there is no significant difference amongst them. On the other hand, our analysis also points out that what really makes a significant difference, on how well the leading digital ecosystems perform against the framework, is the digital proficiency level of the educator. We found that this is because the impact of the solutions are perceived as increasing in importance as the proficiency level of the participant themselves increases. The findings of this research will be of interest to government offices, such as the Ministry of Education and the State Secretary of Education. Additionally, this study will serve professionals who carry out the practical educational work in institutions: such as, principals, school directors, pedagogical board faculty, and teachers. Lastly, this thesis will also be of service to the technological companies that are currently behind the educational digital ecosystems cited above, as the stakeholders want to be, not only ahead of competition, but also in alignment with the requisites of ICT skill sets for the 21st century.