The information society, a challenge for business students?

Abstract

We welcome digital natives to our university assuming they are competent computer and internet users. However, testing their computer skills at the beginning of the course revealed that they are not as highly skilled as was initially expected. The majority of students had surprisingly never heard of the massive open online courses that have been challenging higher education in recent years. Moreover, a lot of students do not use freely accessible learning resources on the web. Collecting data from Eurostat statistics raises an interesting issue – more and more EU households are getting broadband internet access and internet penetration is not only following users that have accessed the internet once in the last 3 months, but users that access the internet daily. It would be expected that individuals, especially those aged under 30, are highly computer and internet literate, but the data analysis revealed otherwise. Not only students included in the research presented in the empirical part of this paper, but also an average young internet user of one of the 28 EU countries. Using Facebook and the first Google search result is not enough anymore.