Assessing the Impact of Higher Education Teachers’ Digital Competences on Creating Innovative Strategies for Evaluating Student Learning Outcomes

Implementation of e-learning can significantly contribute to the improvement of the quality of educational process and its outcomes. E-learning brings many advantages to the organization of the educational process, such as temporal and spatial flexibility in teaching and learning, access to up-to-date and current multimedia and interactive educational content, access to repositories of educational resources and digital libraries, the ability to adapt to individual learning styles, enabling collaborative learning and the acquisition of project and teamwork skills required for the 21st century. As part of the "Digitalna.hr" project, which addresses the need for the development of digital competences as one of the key competences of modern society and is co-financed by the European Union through the European Social Fund, the University North participated as a partner within Goal #2: Development of Digital Education. The scientific research "Digital Competences of Teachers - Higher Education" was conducted using the “Higher Education SELFIEforTEACHERS” tool, employing the self-assessment test technique involving 408 teachers from 75 higher education institutions in Croatia. The tool comprises of 22 competences organized into 6 areas. For the purpose of this study, the research results related to the topics of Professional Engagement, Digital Resources, and Evaluation and Feedback were considered. Based on these areas, information constructs were created: 'Engagement', 'Resources', and 'Evaluation'. The 'Engagement' construct was designed using variables obtained through teachers' self-assessment related to their ability to use digital technologies in teaching, professional interaction with colleagues, students, and the academic community. The 'Resources' construct was designed using variables obtained through teachers' self-assessment related to their ability to identify quality digital educational resources, modify them, create new resources, and adapt them to learning outcomes, student groups, and teaching styles. The 'Evaluation' construct was designed using variables obtained through teachers' self-assessment related to their assessment of the role of digital technologies in improving existing evaluation strategies, creating new and better evaluation methods, their ability to analyse large amounts of digital data on student interaction, concrete feedback, and student support. In order to design information model, allowing for the determination of the influence of each construct on teachers' digital maturity, in the first iteration the factors of gender, age and work experience were tested against the overall self-assessment result and mentioned constructs. In this sense, this paper opens up initiatives for further research related to the development of an original methodology for conceptualizing the development of digital skills of higher education teachers.