Fostering twenty-first century digital skills by the means of educational platforms in the times of COVID-19

ABSTRACTThe outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 influenced all aspects of school life. Teaching and learning moved only online, with different software solutions emerging for teachers to make the most of them. These educational platforms provided more than just a traditional teaching which is focused on the transmission and access to information. Their added value is in a student-centred approach which promotes diverse competencies as regarded to be 21st century skills. This study focused on promoting 21st century digital skills using educational platforms in the times of COVID-19 during school lockdowns. It examined teachers’ responses about the extent to which this promotion was attained during their online teaching using these technologies. A sample of 667 schoolteachers from Serbia was used and relevant data were collected using an online questionnaire. The analysis showed there were significant differences between these medians of promotion of digital skills for different groups of teachers favouring certain groups. These differences could be explained by the fact that teachers in those favoured groups were more experienced in using educational platforms and arranged teamwork within them more often. Additional analysis showed that experience and teamwork were related and that they jointly contributed to digital skills promotion. Suggestions for practice and research are included.KEYWORDS: educational platformslearning environmentsdigital skillsteacher educationprimary and secondary teacherscollaborative learningcooperative learning AcknowledgementThe authors wish to thank all teachers who participated in this study. The research done by the authors was funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (Contract No. 451-03-68/2022-14/200018). Author 1: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing original draft. Author 2: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – review & editing. Author 3: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing.Ethics statementThe participants were informed that the survey would examine to what extent important features of learning have been promoted by using online teaching within digital platforms, and that to support this examination, they were invited to fill in the questionnaire, with a note that the results of this anonymous survey would only be presented at group level. Before they started to give answers, they indicated (using an obligatory field) that they agreed to participate in the survey. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Institute (No: 102/1; approval date: 18 March 2022).Data availability statementThe dataset that supports the findings of this study is available on request from the corresponding author.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 An educational platform can be defined as an integrated set of interactive online services with functionalities that provide the teachers, learners, parents information, tools, and resources to support and enhance educational delivery and management.2 The Reader may, for example, examine a set of articles in a special issue of journal Critical Studies in Education, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Decuypere et al., Citation2021), devoted to these perspectives.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia: [Grant Number 451-03-68/2022-14/200018].Notes on contributorsDjordje M. KadijevichDjordje M. Kadijevich, PhD, is a principal research fellow at the Institute for Educational Research in Belgrade, Serbia. His areas of research include technology supported mathematics, informatics, and statistics education.Nikoleta GutvajnNikoleta Gutvajn, PhD, is a senior research associate at the Institute for Educational Research in Belgrade, Serbia. Her areas of research include student’s identity and perceptions of school underachievement. Since 2014, she has been appointed the director of the Institute.Danijela LjubojevicDanijela Ljubojević, PhD, is a research associate at the Institute for Educational Research in Belgrade, Serbia. Her areas of research include foreign language teaching methodology, applied linguistics, English language teaching in primary and secondary schools, English for specific purposes at higher education.