The Future of Education

What digital skills do tomorrow's higher education students have? Can we talk about a paradigm shift in skills, knowledge and learning strategies? If so, what steps should be taken to maintain student motivation and learning outcomes? This paper is based on extensive data from a national survey on digital practices in primary and secondary education, with 3440 students from four different grades. These students are born and raised in the digital era with smartphones, social media and online games. However, findings indicate that the 12th graders seem to be quite traditional when faced with own learning strategies, as many prefer pen and paper over keyboard and screen. While the 4th and the 7th graders to a larger extent have been trained in using digital learning tools and seem to prefer digital approaches over lectures with pen and papers. There is a mentionable positive development of digital maturity among 12th graders in the last six years. The proportion of students that spend their time on non-academic activities on computers in class has halved. Also, reported disturbance of computers in class has decreased from 47 percent in 2013 to 12 percent in 2019. Almost six out of ten 12th graders say they often do collaborative digital writing with their classmates. They also report of extensive use of computers during most of their classes. That is, writing tools, spreadsheets and presentations. They have less use of creative tools than their younger counterparts, like movie editors, sound editors and computer programming. The 12th graders will meet academia in 2020, while the 7th graders follow five years later. Different blended learning approaches could motivate and engage tomorrow's students. Lecturing and handwriting seem to be more applicable for the forthcoming students, but more interactive solutions could be needed to engage the one's that enroll higher education in five to eight years from now.

Keywords: ICT in education, digital skills, digital natives, blended learning, learning strategies.

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