Analysis of Factors Subjacent to the Implementation of ICTS in Higher Education

Introduction

Technological development in recent decades is changing our daily living habits. This is especially relevant among young people, who have grown up in a technified world and, therefore, are considered a generation of digital or technological natives (Helsper and Eynon, 2010; González-Zamar et al., 2020). Specifically, for today's university students, and professionals of the future, a cell phone, a laptop and the Internet are natural elements of their daily lives.

The technological revolution is bringing about substantial changes in employment patterns. Traditional professions are disappearing, and completely innovative professions or areas of expertise are emerging. The 2016 World Economic Forum (WEF, 2016) analyzed the new global employment indicators, the skills needed in new forms of employment, as well as the future labor resource development strategy. It was concluded that in the next 5 years, modern job skills will have changed by at least 35% as a result of technological development.

However, the proliferation and extensive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing not only the way people work but also the way businesses are conducted (Barba-Sánchez et al., 2007; Taylor, 2015). We should highlight the specific case of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) because they play an important role in economies around the world contributing enormously to the generation of employment and wealth (Ongori and Migiro, 2010). In this sense, there is a broad consensus that ICTs favor the development of SMEs by facilitating a more efficient integration of business processes, reducing transaction and communication costs between companies, and making decision making more efficient (Taylor, 2015; Kumar and Nishu, 2021).

For this reason, the learning processes at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) cannot be oblivious to this new reality, more precisely, the studies of economics and business administration. The educational system must necessarily adapt to these changes since today's university students are the professionals of the future. However, these changes should not be limited to the use of new teaching tools and methods. A strategy must be built to ensure the sustainability of the educational system, i.e., that continuous improvement of the system is possible and adapting to the needs of the real economic sector (Infante-Moro et al., 2019). The ultimate reason for conducting this study lies in the increase in the number of technological profiles in the labor market (Infante-Moro et al., 2021) and in the need for university students to enter the labor market quickly and efficiently (Miralles-Quirós and Jerez-Barroso, 2018).

In this context, the aim of this study is to detect the factors underlying the ICTs in university teaching in economics. For this purpose, we conducted a survey among students of different economics subjects and the answers were processed using a non-metric multidimensional scaling. These results are presented at the end of this chapter. The final aim of this research is to detect the needs and make proposals for change in the university educational field that is also transferable to the real economy. Recent studies show that the impact of these methodologies is direct on the economy in developing countries (Kurniawati, 2021). In this sense, we know that surveys are key to determine which educational problems are preventing students from increasing their level of competence. These surveys provide valuable information that allows us to adapt educational policies to new needs and, as a result, the economy improves in the following generations (Weinstock et al., 2023).