Technical prerequisites from the perspective of teachers and students

4. Access to content and virtual infrastructure

To enable quality education in a digital environment, students and teachers must have unhindered access to a variety of digital resources and virtual infrastructure. This includes digital libraries, academic databases and repositories of scholarly works, such as Hrčak (the Croatian portal of scholarly and professional journals), Scopus and JSTOR, which enable searching for relevant scholarly literature. Access to these resources is essential for developing research competencies, writing seminars, thesis papers and publishing scholarly works.

In addition, many higher education institutions in Croatia are developing their own systems for managing and distributing educational content. Some components of our universities stand out by implementing their own e-repositories, which not only store teaching materials, but also offer access to digital textbooks, video lessons, tests and multimedia teaching units. These systems are often integrated with the national authentication framework AAI@EduHr, which provides students and teachers with easy and secure access to a personalised educational environment.

Virtual laboratories and simulation tools play a particularly important role in higher education, especially in the fields of technical (for example, the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture of the University of Zagreb), natural sciences and biomedical sciences. They enable the performance of experiments, exercises and analyses in a simulated digital environment, thus compensating for limited access to physical laboratories and equipment. By using virtual experiments, students can safely learn from their own mistakes, develop analytical thinking and understanding of complex processes without the need for expensive equipment or laboratory space. In this way, active learning and individual work at one's own pace are encouraged, which further increases the accessibility and flexibility of education.