Do they know everything? Educational innovations aimed at promoting digital skills in university students

Abstract

Digital skills are vital to participate in today’s society. It is thought that young people are digitally competent because they skillfully operate different technological devices. However, recent studies have shown that the digital competences of this generation are disparate and do not extend to all areas. Such arguments gave support to the educational innovation that is described in this article, whose objective was oriented, precisely, to promote the use of a tool (Google Drive) and the essay of a skill (writing and online collaborative editing) that is not usually of the most developed among young people. 151 university students from different disciplinary areas participated. They were asked to solve an academic task in groups with the mediation of a shared document in Google Drive where they had to advance and collaboratively edit the answer. After the task a questionnaire was administered, whose answers are analyzed in this article. The most outstanding results showed that only 5% of the participants had previous experiences to collaboratively write and edit a shared document in the cloud. Furthermore, 85% positively valued the tool for future implementations in other contexts, after having experienced and known its use from the proposed innovation.