The Digital Turn in Higher Education: A Try to demystify the Myth of the “Digital Natives”

Digital technology has recently become a ubiquitous feature of the modern era posing problems to higher education institutions. Digitization of the academic life has brought forth the claims that there is an evident disparity between the digital naturals and digital immigrants and that the myth of the former is “undemystifiable.” The claim that the new digitized generation has its own distinguished learning preferences, skills of learning and beliefs about learning should make higher education authorities revisit their curricula and “reshuffle the academic cards” so that the digital immigrants could catch up with the fast-running pace of the digitized train and provide the digital natives with what they need for a successful academic life. The overall aim of the present work therefore is to investigate the extent to which the so-called digital natives really have control of the use of educational technology either as part of their self-directed learning practices or as part of formal tertiary teaching, the type of technologies they prefer to use, whether they possess the required digital skills that are important for their future careers, and how vital the digital skills are in boosting their employability. A questionnaire survey was used for doing the objectives of this study. 218 students participated in this study and completed the questionnaire. Then the data were collected and analyzed through frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The findings of the present study indicated that the media change under the created discourse of “moral panic” has unveiled the singularity of this generation and has forced academic authorities to reconsider learning, teaching as well as both skills and employability of such a generation for a better academic higher education system.