Digital Literacy in Higher Education: the results from the Italian teachers’ 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 teachers’ survey reveal that, regarding their digital habits, the digital sources they use the most for their course-related studies are general search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), Wikipedia, and governmental websites; contrarily, they do not use much Google Scholar, library catalogs, and library databases. About the effective use of Web sources, when they find a Web source they do not really consider if the page contains useful links to other Web sources and a bibliography or references list. Furthermore, the tools they mostly use to prepare course-related assignments are presentation tools, document sharing programmes and spell checkers; they do not really use citation management tools, social bookmarking, alerting services and Wiki server providers for creating and sharing Web content.

The teachers’ 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 them are those related to the identification of formally established and verified information sources; knowledge of the items to be found in the library catalogs; use of academic databases; search strategies (how to search for information on search engines).

Comparing the results from the teachers’ and the students’ survey, the findings seem to attest that their strengths and weaknesses in digital information literacy skills are considerably similar. This testifies to the need of providing some ad hoc courses to both Italian university teachers and students about digital information literacy topics, especially those concerning reliable information research, academic libraries and databases, and Internet search strategies.