Digital Culture and Digital Media: Professional Competences

Abstract

The article provides the results of a scientific research, which purpose is to find out if there is a need for introducing curriculums and academic disciplines aimed at the development of digital and media competences to the students studying under bachelor and master programs. To achieve the purpose set, there has been held a questionnaire to learn the influence of digital culture and digital media on the academic activity and professional formation of students majoring in different areas. Particularly, the questionnaire covered bachelor and master students majoring in ‘Journalism’, ‘Philology’, ‘Information, Library and Archival Science’, ‘Pedagogical Education: Primary Education’, ‘Pedagogical Education: Preschool Education’. The empiric research results have been put into the basis of theoretic comprehension of current opportunities and challenges of new specific information-and-virtual forms of culture and cultural communication. There were used a number of methods of scientific cognition to obtain objective results: a questionnaire, an expert judgment, methods of statistical analysis (a factor analysis: a principal component analysis, a correlation analysis), general scientific methods (an analysis, a synthesis, a summarizing), logical-and-analytical methods (an induction, a deduction), as well as graphic and mathematic methods. The results received prove the practicability of introducing a comprehensive block of disciplines, oriented towards the development of digital and media competences for academic degrees of bachelor and master in different areas. The practical importance of the results is that they can be applied to new curriculums and academic disciplines for a bachelor degree program for both professionals of social communication and information technologies and students of non-humanitarian areas. The results of the study will be useful for creation a master degree program, in particular for inter-disciplinary educational-professional programs oriented towards the teaching of information specialists who are able to work in social, economic and technological areas. Also, the results of the study can develop technology for measuring digital and media competences of specialists in different areas.