Analysing the digital competence of future education professionals in times of pandemics

Abstract

The pandemic has brought about significant changes in a variety of areas, including education. In this field, it meant, among other things, the change from a face-to-face mode to an online or hybrid approach in higher education, making technology the necessary means to continue with the training process. The digital competence of students became, in a direct way, a key part of the process itself, a particularly relevant issue in the case of future teachers, called upon to develop not only their own skills, but also those of their students. From this perspective, this article aims to analyse the evolution of the digital competence of students of Primary Education Teaching and Pedagogy at the University of Malaga because of the change of modality caused by the pandemic. Specific attention is paid to gender and degree as possible conditioning variables of the level of technological skills. We use a validated questionnaire explicitly aimed at assessing the level of digital competence of future teachers with a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest approach. The results show that there is an evolution in the technological skills of the students, with men and, specifically, those students who had previously studied a subject with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) content, showing a higher level of digital competence.

Keywords
Digital competence; Teacher training; Higher education; Pandemics; Covid-19