Digital Equity: Causes and measurement

Abstract

Digital divide among students has become a concern to many governments. Previously digital divide (DD) is seen as the difference between those who own a computer with those who don’t. But this has changed to how much technology access is done by someone. Thus measuring this digital divide has moved from computer ownership to technology accessing. This has also caused the issues involved in measuring DD to change, and leads to terms such as Digital Equity (DE). In this paper, the issues which should be included when measuring DE are discussed. Along with this, Gini coefficient, an approach commonly used in measuring income distribution is shown on how it can be used in measuring DE.