Abstract
Emerging technologies are leading to a rethink informal education and giving rise to new educational models, especially at university level. This paper looks into the strategies used by female university students to learn ICT and how this influences their level of digital competence. To do this, we surveyed 368 Spanish university women aged 20 to 34, using two scales measuring their learning strategies and digital skills. The findings showed that university students used a variety of strategies to learn about ICT, with strategies based on independent and collaborative learning prevailing. Results also showed that those women who used a wider variety of strategies to learn ICT attained more advanced digital skills. These results suggest the need to incorporate these forms of learning used by women with advanced digital skills into university teaching.
Highlights
The 2020 digital agenda underlines the wealth of opportunity opened up by the digital age for creating new educational scenarios and strategies
Our study focuses on learning strategies and their influence on the digital competence of female university students
Strategies used by female university students to learn ICT The female university students in our sample showed a preference for learning via autonomous and intuitive learning, as opposed to other types of formulas, and they did so experimenting with technologies (Fig. 1)
Summary
The 2020 digital agenda underlines the wealth of opportunity opened up by the digital age for creating new educational scenarios and strategies. The Horizon Report (Johnson, Adams Becker, Estrada, & Freeman, 2015) emphasizes that education needs to review educational scenarios, making them more flexible and adapting them to digital technologies. The inclusion of new technologies in everyday-life is revolutionizing learning paradigms and leading to a revision of models of university education in the light of new pedagogical theories. These pedagogies constitute nascent approaches to education which are emerging around the use of digital technologies to fully exploit its communicative, informational, collaborative, interactive, creative and innovative potential in a new learning culture Invisible learning (Cobo & Moravec, 2011), rhyzomatic learning (Cormier, 2008), connectivism (Siemens, 2005) or ubiquitous learning
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