How does IT Mindfulness help effective online learning?

Bans and social distancing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have forced educational institutions to switch from traditional face-to-face learning modes to online learning environments. This sudden shift resulted in increased IT requirements that not all learners could handle.

Reports during the pandemic highlighted issues such as loss of learning and productivity, as well as emotional distress among students around the world. During the pandemic, the emotional state of the students was such that many could not focus on studying. This also affected their self-directed learning effectiveness, which includes both productivity and creativity. Productivity is the ability to use technology to produce academic results that are efficient and of better quality. Creativity means the use of creative processes in the learning process with IT tools. The central question is: what can be done to increase the effectiveness of IT-mediated learning during the pandemic and beyond? Promoting IT mindfulness is one way to increase learning effectiveness.

Specific features

IT mindfulness is an IT-specific individual trait that can help users get value from their IT use. It is noticeable when users are focused on the present, paying attention to characteristic operational details, and showing an interest in exploring new features with the overall goal of gaining better insight and improving how they work.

IT mindfulness is a dynamic and malleable trait that has four key dimensions: attention to distinction, awareness of multiple perspectives, openness to new things and orientation in the present. Discrimination is the ability to recognize the differences between the capabilities of old and new functions of an IT system

Multi-perspective awareness is the ability of users to observe various potential uses of feature sets that are beyond the intentions of the designer or manager. Openness to new things is the ability to go beyond standard IT functions such as speech and text and experiment with less familiar functions such as virtual reality and screen sharing to increase productivity. After all, present-day orientation is users' ability to focus on the present and understand that their system usage must vary in response to different contexts.

IT-conscious users are more likely to recognize changes in their environment and the corresponding options for action. As a rule, they have a systemic repertoire of action that enables them to use the technology innovatively in an academic environment.

IT-conscious learners can improvise on their previous knowledge structures and look for alternative solutions in the new IT-mediated learning context. They use IT to find, store and reuse knowledge that can help them innovate with IT for learning. Thus, IT mindfulness offers students a self-regulating coping mechanism in view of the increased IT requirements for learning during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

contribution

The individual characteristics of the user have a positive or negative influence on the reaction to stressful demands. Resilience to sudden technological change during COVID-19 is shaped by learners' perceptions of technology use, which are expected to influence their perception of technology-mediated learning. Students with low IT awareness tend to perceive increased IT demands as an obstacle, as they rate the loss, fear, or harm from use, and respond to these as negative or stressful.

On the contrary, IT-conscious students tend to view increased IT requirements as a challenge in order to hone their skills and improve their flexibility and therefore respond positively or eustically.

Educators should consider IT mindfulness when designing their technology-driven teaching process. For students with high IT mindfulness, switching to online learning would have been relatively easy.

Targeted efforts are required to identify and train students at risk to improve IT mindfulness. Educational institutions should proactively increase the IT mindfulness of their students by actively teaching and training instead of sharpening their technological infrastructure alone.

This will help reduce the negative effects of online learning on student wellbeing, creativity and productivity.

The author is an Associate Professor (Information Systems) at the SP Jain School of Global Management.

his article is based on a study published in the December 2021 issue of the International Journal of Information Management, co-authored by Shalini Chandra; Anuragini Shirish, Associate Professor at the Mines-Télécom Business School Institute; and Shirish C. Srivastava, professor at HEC Paris.

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