Developing students’ digital competences in the era of digital transformation - a European perspective

Digital competence is an extremely important topic, especially in this age of digital transformation, where not only humans, but also technology in the broadest sense, have a part to play in the rendering, transmission of information. On the one hand, tools such as AI and ICT facilitate work and education, but on the other hand, they make some of the key digital skills recede into the background, which will adversely affect the future - e.g. career shaping. Some even equate digital competence with the ability to use social media, which often becomes a source of information for them. This article focuses on 3 areas of digital competence: information, communication and content creation. The research has been conducted over the past three years on a sample of 173 second-semester undergraduate students at the Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology. The results indicate that students consider digital competences related to the area of information, communication and content creation to be helpful in the course of their education. The research focused on nine key skills in this area, which were also the focus of the study. Recognising fake news and being able to refute it was considered the best mastered skill, while the least mastered skill was finding statistics related to a topic. An additional benefit of shaping digital competences in practice was the possibility to maintain a social media account on scientific topics related to the field of study. This made the learning process more attractive, but also brought some difficulties. Importantly - for the majority of the respondents, the acquired skills will play a role in the future - probably not only at the educational stage, but also in their future work.