Abstract:

Introduction:
The university education nearly in all study programmes includes digital technology and their use should contribute to improve students' digital competences. The "Future Skills" framework in Germany emphasized that digital skills are among the future skills that should be acquired during a degree programme. The EU has described a European framework for digital competences (DigComp 2.1) which comprises five competence areas:
(1) information and data literacy,
(2) communication and collaboration,
(3) digital content creation,
(4) safety and
(5) problem solving (Carretero, Vuorikari & Punie, 2017).
The aim of our study was to assess the level of digital competences of university students in Germany according to DigCom 2.1 model. Furthermore, we analysed gender-specific differences and differences between students working in companies and non-working students.

Method:
The sample size of our study was N=69 economic students (f=34; m=34; Bachelor degree n=52; Master degree n=17). Data were collected through an online questionnaire administered to students enrolled in one German university of Applied Sciences. The 20 items of the German instrument measures the five DigKomp 2.1 areas (Kremkow, 2020) on a five-point Likert-type scale that ranged from (1) totally disagree to (5) totally agree. The scores of each area that are summed as higher scores represent more digital competence. Descriptive statistics were carried out to determine the mean values and standard deviations overall and for the five scales. The non-parametric Mann Whitney U-test was carried out to investigate significant differences in relation to gender and occupation.

Results:
The results demonstrated that the students self-reported their level of digital competences on average (M=3.64; SD=.75). However, students evaluated their digital skills differently in the five competence areas. While they rated their skills in information and data literacy (M=3.94; SD=.79) and their competences to communicate and collaborate (M=3.97; SD=.88) as high and the areas of safety (M=3.66; SD=.89) and problem solving (M=3.65; SD=.97) as average they assessed their own abilities to create digital content (M=3.03; SD=.91) lower. No significant gender-specific differences were found for all areas. With regard to the five scales, there was a significant difference between male and female students on the "Safety" scale (p=.016) with a medium effect. No significant difference was found between the genders in the other scales. The data showed no statistically significant difference between students working in companies and those not working in companies.

Discussion:
Our study reveals that the level of university students' digital competence referring to the five key competences described in DigCom 2.1 model is on average. Similar results can be found in the study of Kremkow (2021). A systematic review of Sánchez-Caballé et al. (2020) exposes that many university students do not have a high level of digital competence referring to the five competence areas even if the current university student generation is described as so-called digital natives and many new learning and teaching tools have been developed for university education in the last years. These results are consistent with the findings of Senkbeil et al. (2019). According to these results it might be necessary to implement interdisciplinary training of digital competences in the curricula and train university teachers in this area.

Keywords:

University education, digital competences, research.