Digital Literacy in Higher Education: the results from the Italian students’ survey

The main objective of the DIGI-Key project is to design an innovative and competitive curriculum corresponding to the current digital information literacy, and to design an e-learning course for university students.

The so called “Digital Information Literacy” is a set of abilities through which individuals can access, evaluate, and use digital information in an autonomous, proper, and effective way. Today, this kind of skills is rapidly becoming essential both in the labour market and in the field of education. In particular, students need to acquire these competences to be able to do homework, researching, writing and, afterwards, to enhance their employability and chances of success when entering the labour market. Consequently, and at the same time, teachers should develop the competences that enable them to transfer these knowledge and abilities to the students.

The first step of the project was to investigate the level of digital information literacy skills already possessed by Italian university teachers and students. Through a “Digital literacy skills” questionnaire and the analysis of its results, it has been possible to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The survey investigated both the participants’ digital habits and digital skills.

The results from the Italian students’ questionnaire reveal that, concerning their digital habits, the digital sources they seem to use the most are general search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), Wikipedia, and video sharing sites; they do not frequently use Google Scholar, library catalogs, library databases, social networking sites, and slide sharing sites. In Internet navigation, when they find a Web source, they do not pay attention to what the URL is and what it means. Moreover, the tools they mostly use to prepare course-related assignments are presentation tools, document sharing programmes and spell checkers; they do not use much highlighting feature of word processors, track-changes feature of word processors, citation management tools, social bookmarking, alerting services, Wiki server providers for creating and sharing Web content, and blog server providers for creating and sharing Web content.

The students’ digital skills test highlighted that they seem quite knowledgeable about how to use information taken from the Web. On the other hand, the most difficult arguments for the students are identification of formally established and verified information sources; knowledge of the items to be found in the library catalogs; use of academic databases; and finally, search strategies (how to search for information on search engines).