NEW LEARNING ENVIRONMENT MODEL FOR THEORETICAL LECTURES

According to many studies the generations of students who are digital natives have different requirements in regard of theoretical lectures in comparison with the generations of non digital natives. At universities in Serbia, theoretical instruction is still conducted in the traditional way, and the Bologna system is applied only selectively. Awarding student participation in theoretical lectures as a part of pre-exam assessment is formal and without clear criteria, which degrades theoretical lectures as they are reduced to the level of awarding attendance and not of awarding active participation in class. The goals of this pilot study are: a) to find answers to the question of how to make students who are digital natives active during theoretical lectures at the university, for the purpose of recognizing more clearly the quality of their participation in class; b) to include the information thus obtained into the decision-making process which provides a more just verdict on their final grade (learning performance of students) and to increase the use of information technology in delivering lectures at universities in the domain of humanities and social sciences. The research examined the effectiveness of arousing students' attention during theoretical lectures in Computer Literacy (Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad, Serbia) by using random testing of students' knowledge. Two groups of students were subject to two different approaches to teaching: the traditional approach and the computer-oriented one. The first group of the students attended their lectures in a traditional classroom where students were randomly tested by means of paper-based tests. The other group of students attended their lectures in a modified computer lab in which students were randomly tested by means of a special piece of software. At the end of the course students' attitudes about the traditional and the computer-oriented approach were collected by means of a questionnaire. The preliminary results seem to suggest that students on the whole are not particularly interested to actively participate in classes, but they are interested in collecting pre-exam points based on them attending theoretical lectures. The majority of surveyed students think that the proposed model of active attention excitation will contribute to better acquisition of learning materials and to better performance in exams. There are indications that students prefer a teaching model in which they can clearly perceive practical benefits for them. It can be concluded that the proposed computer-oriented approach of conducting theoretical lectures and using random testing is more in line with the requirements and needs of the student generations who are digital natives.