Enhancing Digital Literacy in Higher Education: The Impact of Digital Scenarios on Tertiary Students’ Learning Outcomes

Recent years have witnessed growing research interests in the roles of digital literacy (DL) in tertiary students’ sustainable development (e.g., Imjai et al., 2024), including (1) employers’ understanding of the importance of DL in tertiary students’ employability (e.g., Khalid et al., 2020), (2) tertiary students’ perceptions of DL practices in social media (e.g., Gu et al., 2023), and (3) undergraduate pre-service teachers’ understanding of the relationship between DL competence and DL practices (e.g., Zhang et al., 2024). However, little research attention has been paid to exploring effective pedagogical approaches to improving tertiary students’ DL levels. With the increasing use of digital technologies in educational practices, more research needs to be conducted to examine the effects of digital instructional design on tertiary students’ DL levels. To date, one of the most widely used digital technologies in educational settings is digital scenario content (Pedro et al., 2019). Digital scenarios in educational contexts, which refer to technology-enhanced interactive and simulated learning environments (Wouters et al., 2013), have been incorporated into pedagogical practices for cultivating students’ problem-solving skills and creative thinking (Hou, 2011; Pedro et al., 2019). Nevertheless, few studies have investigated the usefulness of digital scenarios in developing students’ DL skills. To fill these research gaps, we conducted digital scenario workshops at a university in Hong Kong to achieve two research objectives: (1) to examine whether and how tertiary students’ DL levels can be improved through digital scenarios; (2) to explore tertiary students’ perceptions of the roles of digital scenarios in promoting their understanding of DL. Data were collected through pre- and post-test Likert-scale questionnaires and an open-ended questionnaire. Quantitative and qualitative findings reveal that (1) the digital scenario workshops significantly enhanced the students’ levels of all indicators of DL, namely, visual literacy, technological literacy, communication literacy, computer literacy, information literacy, and media literacy; (2) the participants mentioned advantages of digital scenarios in improving DL levels, including convenience, high efficiency, and promotion of interactions; (3) after the intervention, changes can be noted in the participants’ understanding of DL. This study can contribute to the literature on DL by exploring the role of an innovative e-learning method (i.e., digital scenarios) in improving tertiary students’ DL levels and updating their understanding of DL.