Measuring the digital competency of freshmen at a higher education institute

This study profiles the digital literacy of the freshmen at a higher education institute in Fiji. An online survey was designed to gather data from 1595 students, which reduced to 867 after data cleaning. The objective of this research study is to evaluate the digital literacy status of freshmen at a higher education institute and evaluate if there is any correlation between their literacies and their overall digital literacy. The digital literacy competencies of the freshmen were evaluated by using a newly designed Digital Literacy Scale (DLS). For each student, the literacy score for each component of digital literacy identified for this study (media, information, technology, computer, visual, and communication literacy) and the overall digital literacy was calculated using the DLS. The results show that the freshmen were highly digitally literate. The Cronbach alpha test showed that the newly designed DLS was reliable and had a high internal consistency. A correlation analysis – Spearman’s correlation was also carried out which indicated that the overall digital literacy of the students was dependent on the individual score for each of the component of the digital literacy identified in this study