Digital Literacy: A Catalyst for the 21st Century Education

The seamless integration of new digital technologies into higher education teaching and learning has transformed education pedagogies and changed how students learn. The students are now required to have digital competencies to survive in the era of learning with technology; therefore, measuring the students’ digital competencies is of utmost importance. This study evaluates the first-year university students’ digital competencies at a higher education institute using a newly designed digital literacy measuring tool named digitlitfj. The digitlitfj is an online tool consisting of a 5 point Likert scale questionnaire ranging from ‘No understanding’ to ‘Advanced level of understanding’ that was piloted to the first-year university students. The results show that 86.15% of the students were average to very highly digitally literate. Also, Deep learning, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Decision Tree algorithms in RapidMiner were used to evaluate the most important and influential variables in predicting an individual’s digital literacy competency. The results show that all the variables utilized in the research were important, with computer literacy being the most influential variable in predicting an individual’s digital literacy.