Analyzing Students’ Motivation for Acquiring Digital Competences

In this paper, we explore students' motivation to use digital technologies before and after a course aimed at contributing to students' digital empowerment and critical perspective on digitalization. Based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), we designed a questionnaire to observe changes in students' perceived competence, autonomy and relatedness. In addition to students' motivation, we investigated students' technology use continuance intention following Information Systems Continuance Theory. The surveys took place in the winter terms of 2020/21 and 2021/22 in a pretest-postest format. The course was open to students of all disciplines. As the questionnaire of this study was also distributed in a similar course in the teacher education program, we compared the responses of the students from all disciplines with the responses of prospective teachers. Due to the timing of the questionnaires, we also contextualized our findings regarding distance learning regulations during the early years of the pandemic. We validated and evaluated the questionnaire using exploratory factor and exploratory correlation analysis and found that students' perceived competence and perceived relatedness increased after course participation in both years. In line with SDT, these findings are also consistent with students reporting an increase in intrinsic motivation in both years. Students' perceived autonomy became more diverse in both years. In this regard, our findings support research suggesting that COVID-19 and distance learning regulations had a negative impact on students' perceptions of digital media autonomy. The comparison of results between the all-discipline cohort and the teacher education cohort showed that students benefited differently from the course depending on their field of study, which will be taken into account in future course iterations.