Studying the digital competencies of enabling education students at a regional Australian university

As technology-based devices become increasingly pervasive in everyday life and we use them in new and different ways, it is not surprising that higher education is looking at how these devices will be integrated into the classroom, and how a student’s pre-existing digital competencies impact their learning. Therefore, effective teaching practice must focus also on understanding the affordances that students bring to the learning situation. This paper reports on a project comparing students’ attitudes and performance prior to and after completion of a computing unit, as part of an enabling education course, to map their digital competency, allowing us to assess these affordances, and the impacts they have on the learning process. The results revealed that age had no correlation to the level of digital competency, and that the mode of device usage was a much more important measure of digital competency than other factors tested. Overall, these results, despite a small sample size, demonstrate the need for greater granularity in the description of the technical skills of students, and suggest that digital competency should be measured using a combination of confidence, applications used and also device and purpose-specific experience