DIGITAL LEARNERS AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CATALONIA: A SKEPTICAL VIEW OF THE PHENOMENON OF THE NET GENERATION
DIGITAL LEARNERS AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CATALONIA: A SKEPTICAL VIEW OF THE PHENOMENON OF THE NET GENERATION

Summary/Abstract: Some authors, most of them from the United States, have stated that university students born after 1982 have been profoundly influenced by the advent of digital technologies, showing different characteristics when compared to previous generations. These students, called the Net Generation, are supposed to have some particular characteristics related to the use of ICT. However, are those students at the UOC born after the 80s really more familiar with ICT tools than those born in previous generations? Do they show different study habits and learning paths? Different research lines highlight that scientific data or statistics are rarely used when discussing this generation’s characteristics. The international research project, Digital Learners in Higher Education seeks to develop a sophisticated and evidence-based understanding of university learners in different institutional contexts and the perception of cultures in their use of technology in a social and educational context. This research project is led by the British Columbia Institute of Technology and includes the University of Regina and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). The cases consist of three distinct postsecondary institutional contexts: a Canadian polytechnic teaching institution (BCIT), a Canadian research-intensive university (University of Regina) and a European fully online university (Open University of Catalonia). In the first phase of the research, BCIT partners designed a survey. Later, the UOC partners adapted the survey to the characteristics of their all-in-programs “ICT Competences” course. In this paper, the 1,036 student responses to the survey are deeply analysed in order to demonstrate that there is no statistically significant relationship between our student’s age and the Net Generation’s characteristics.

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