Abstract
Driven by Information Technologies (IT), universities are making in depth changes to the nature and form of learning processes, which are intended to better prepare students for entry into the labour market. In this paper, we focus on the evolution of students’ use of IT in an institution characterized by organizational changes, and we analyse the determinants of students’ e-skills using a sample set of French university students. We show that students’ involvement in the use of IT increases their e-skills. IT learning by doing and IT learning by using also increase some categories of students’ e-skills. In addition, collaborative and cooperative learning are positively associated with students’ advanced e-skills.
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With respect to the debate about the productivity paradox (Triplett 1999), performance associated with IT usage depends strongly on the adoption of New Organizational Practices (NOP) (Greenan and Mairesse 2004; Greenan and Walkowiak 2006). During the last decade, many firms have experienced a reorganization of their workplace. New work practices have been adopted such as job rotation, delayering, self-directed work-team, just-in-time and total quality management (Askenazy et al. 2002; Caroli and Van Reenen 2001; Işık, and Yılmaz 2011) find a positive impact of new work practices on productivity especially in connection with information technologies’. Askenazy and Gianella (2000), Black and Lynch (2001) and Bresnahan et al. (2002) underline the importance of introducing clusters of complementary practices. New work practices are biased against unskilled labour leading to an upskilling of firms’ occupational structure. According to Arvanitis and Loukis (2009), IT, new organizational practices and human capital can contribute to firm efficiency and performance.
European Commission 2011.
Initially the evaluation was based upon publication. Higher Education Teachers were not “incited” to invest in pedagogy. Most of them have not followed any pedagogical training (Ben Youssef and Hadhri 2009).
Please note that we also tested our adoption equation through ordered logit and ordered probit models. The results achieved were very similar, which confirms the robustness of the equation. Nevertheless, the multinomial logit model was preferred insofar as it is difficult to interpret the ESKILLS_3 and ESKILLS_4 classes as ordered in terms of categories of e-skills.
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Ben Youssef, A., Dahmani, M. & Omrani, N. Information technologies, students’ e-skills and diversity of learning process. Educ Inf Technol 20, 141–159 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-013-9272-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-013-9272-x