Ante Knežević’s scientific contributions

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the higher education improvement and highlighted the maintenance of public health as an essential priority. Due to this unexpected situation, the educational system moved from face-to-face to distance learning without prior preparations. This contingency made it possible to study the benefits of ICT tools in the educational process. Starting from the primary function of the educational process and through the forecast of future trends in education, this paper presents the guidelines for improvement of the teaching and learning processes and some opportunities for their implementation. A survey was conducted among the Faculty of Economics, Business, and Tourism students in Split, Croatia, who evaluated the acceptance of various ICT tools. Based on the obtained research results, generic strategic guidelines for the effective use of IT tools in teaching are presented, including their potential impact on accreditation criteria.

One of the main goals of any higher education system is developing students’ critical thinking. Critical thinking contributes to decision-making and problem-solving skills, whether for professional or personal purposes. Teaching, on the other hand, has been largely influenced by new information technologies which have changed some of the related concepts and tools. The quality of the teaching process is multidimensional which is why no single unit of its measurement has been developed yet, in spite of numerous surveys that have collected massive amounts of information from the existing practice. The aim of this paper is to establish the most appropriate higher education quality measure, which would consist of all relevant indicators from different aspects, including implementation of critical thinking in the teaching process, weighting by two main groups of participants in the process - teachers and students. Multicriteria decision-making has been recognised as a suitable framework for achieving this goal. In fact, the problem of measuring teaching staff performance could be set up as a classical problem of multicriteria decision-making. With this approach the quality of teaching process should be simultaneously estimated by n quality assurance criteria and in accordance with those criteria m alternatives (professors) would be ranked or estimated.