Abstract:

Digital competences, or information and communication technology (ICT) skills, encompass the secure, critical and responsible use of digital technologies and are also a de facto requirement at German universities: for example, they enable students to efficiently find and use scientific information in an informed manner, allow asynchronous collaboration between researchers regardless of location and the effective and trouble-free use of digital elements in teaching. Despite the increasing importance of these skills, observations from the first-level IT support of the Centre for Information and Media Technology (ZIM) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) show a wide range in terms of the level of digital skills.

In our project, we want to test whether the digital skills of our users can be systematically recorded and measured. This is intended to improve our IT support and make changes visible. In the long term, this will allow us to gain a clearer picture of our users and identify potential discrepancies between the IT services offered and the skills of our users.

The EU's "Digital Competence Framework for Citizens", the DigComp reference framework (version 2.2), can be used to structure digital skills. DigComp provides a transferable basis for determining and measuring digital skills. DigComp is already being used at German universities: Most commonly, it serves as a starting point for online self-assessment combined with a qualification offer or for knowledge or performance tests. We are investigating the potential of transferring these proven criteria to our existing data.

Our perspective from IT support is reflected in our base of data, the support tickets that arise in the day-to-day operations of our university. We identify and evaluate options for anonymising the data (support tickets in a fixed period of time) and examine this data corpus to see to what extent the areas of expertise defined in DigComp can be reflected in it. Existing work processes, such as the assignment of tickets to defined IT services, will serve as the basis for a system for categorising requests into competencies.

One particular challenge is to assign competences and competence levels to the existing requests. The EU's language reference framework has long been a suitable concept for categorising language levels based on human assessment, but there are no known examples to date for categorising specific skills in a framework of digital competences that are based on existing support requests. The project will attempt to categorise such specific requests for IT support in the DigComp reference framework. A basic categorisation of this kind and the observation of the change in a skill level over time based on this can serve as a good basis for the subsequent processing of such categorisations on the basis of AI.

It is our objective to come as close as possible to an automated, data protection-compliant procedure for analysing tickets according to the DigComp criteria and therefore to research the extent to which users' requests to IT support can be used as a basis for determining ICT or digital skills.

Keywords:

Competences, ICT skills, support, DigComp.