Abstract:

Developing students’ digital competencies is essential for preparing future professionals to engage effectively in increasingly digitalized academic, professional, and societal environments. Within the national Recovery and Resilience Plan, the University of Ljubljana (UL) addressed this need through the ULTRA project (University of Ljubljana for a Sustainable Society), which introduced systemic measures to strengthen digital literacy across 29 higher education study programmes. The project supports the digital transition by fostering digital competences into curricula by updating existing or developing new elective or compulsory courses, and promoting innovative, technology-enhanced learning practices. In this context, the present study examines UL students’ self-assessed digital literacy at the beginning and end of the academic year, providing insight into the impact of these curricular reforms.

This study explores the self-assessed digital competence of UL students, based on the DigCompEdu framework. The survey included 81 items grouped into five competence domains: information and data literacy (12), communication and collaboration (23), digital content creation (16), safety (17), and problem solving (13). To ensure clearer interpretation of students’ self-assessments, all items were evaluated using a four-level Likert scale. Responses were subsequently aggregated into four categories: worst assessed, poorly assessed, well assessed, and best assessed. A quantitative evaluation was conducted involving 1496 students at the beginning and 528 students at the end of the 2023/24 academic year. An online questionnaire was administered at both measurement points. Participation was voluntary, and the lower response rate at the end of the year is partly due to students’ preparation for examinations.

The results indicate consistent improvement in students’ self-assessed digital literacy across all five domains. The most substantial progress occurred in digital safety, where the proportion of well assessed competences increased most noticeably (from 47% to 52%), accompanied by a marked reduction in both worst assessed (from 8% to 5%) and poorly assessed (from 23% to 21%) responses. Improvement was also observed in communication and collaboration and digital content creation. Although problem solving and information and data literacy also showed progress, the improvements were slightly more moderate, suggesting that competences such as critical evaluation of information and advanced troubleshooting may require additional instructional emphasis. Notably, digital content creation exhibited the strongest decline in the worst assessed category (from 12% to 9%), indicating reduced uncertainty in applying copyright principles, citation practices, and creative digital production. Across all domains, the share of worst assessed and poorly assessed responses consistently decreased (from 7% to 5% and from 21% to 18%, respectively), while well assessed and best assessed competences increased (from 46% to 49% and from 26% to 28%, respectively). Overall, the aggregated digital literacy score reflects a clear shift toward higher competence levels, demonstrating that ULTRA project effectively strengthened students’ digital literacy.

Keywords:

Digital Literacy, Digital competences, Higher Education, Curriculum reform, Self-Assessment, Digital Transformation in Education.