Profiling the digital readiness of higher education students for transformative online learning in the post-soviet nations of Georgia and Ukraine

This study profiles the digital readiness of university students in Georgia and Ukraine for fully online collaborative learning, theorized as an educational pathway to democratic transformation. The Digital Competency Profiler was used to gather data from 150 students in Georgia and 129 in Ukraine about their digital competences. The analysis grouped students into high-, medium- and low-readiness segments for 52 actions in technical, communicational, informational and computational dimensions. Findings show that large percentages of Georgian and Ukrainian students are ill-prepared for many online-learning activities, and there is generally greater readiness on mobile devices than desktops/laptops. However, large percentages of Ukrainian students appear in high-readiness segments for communicating online and using social networks. In Georgia, many students report high-readiness for technical and computational interactions. Therefore, the researchers recommend using the digital-readiness data in tandem with a well-chosen, online-learning framework to align these patterns of strengths with future educational innovation.