Abstract:

During last years, different studies have highlighted the importance of improving the average knowledge of digital skills for European citizens to achieve an enhanced digital society. Different initiatives have emerged from those studies, especially in the European Union, which released the DigComp project containing a set of digital competences any citizen would have to acquire, in an appropriate level, for a suitable development in a digital society.

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a course on digital competences for first-year university students to enhance their academic development. The course is the result of the joint work of faculty from the Computer Science and Systems Engineering Department of the University of Zaragoza and staff from the Library of the aforesaid University.

The proposed methodology begins with the design of a course properly aligned with the DigComp 2.0 framework; later, an online deployment of the course is carried out for eleven degrees of different macro-areas at the University of Zaragoza; and, finally, the experience is assessed. The DigComp2.0 framework describes digital competence based on 21 competencies grouped into 5 areas (Information and data literacy, Communication and collaboration, Digital content creation, Safety and Problem solving). Since tackling the whole digital competence was beyond our scope, it was decided to design the course taking as a guideline the accomplishment of an academic work and, on this basis, to include in the course just some aspects of digital competence necessary for that purpose.

The course is structured in 8 subjects that include aspects related to 10 competences (of 21) belonging to the 5 areas. We especially want to highlight the contents of the course aligned with two of the areas. As regards Area 1 (Information and data literacy), the course emphasizes the need to efficiently search information in digital environments, using selection criteria and personal navigation strategies, as well as to analyze and evaluate the credibility of the data. In addition, it is intended that the student is able to store and organize information in a digital environment efficiently. With respect to Area 3 (Digital content creation), the course deals with the creation and edition of digital documents, insisting on the awareness to respect copyright (avoiding plagiarism and using accurately the references).
Furthermore, a descriptive analysis has been carried out to evaluate the proposal. Some data of the analysis are the following: a success rate of 77.8%; a turnout of 64.4%; the average of previous knowledge of the students is below 3, in a scale between 0 (nothing) and 5 (much); an improvement of one point between the initial and final tests on learning outcomes is achieved; and at least 65% of the students evaluate their degree of satisfaction with the course as 4 (good) or 5 (very good).

As main results, we emphasize that students did not have a relevant training in digital competences during their pre-university studies and that the contents of the course have proved to be useful. In addition, the degree of satisfaction of students related to the realization of the course is rather high. Results confirm that the Digital Competence must be an asset for early university students.

Keywords:

Computer literacy, information literacy, technological literacy, higher education, cross-curricular competence, learning experience.