Personal Learning Environments to understand and develop Digital Competence: analysis of University students in Spain

Both at international and national levels it is observed that it is increasingly important to specify digital competences in the educational context, referring both to teachers and students. If we look more specifically at students, digital competence is a broad theoretical construct that, among its dimensions, supports the need to analyze and enhance the Personal Learning Environment (PLE), a construct that supports the CAPPLE Project and that allows us to understand in a global way how students use their digital competence in their academic learning processes. In this paper we show the main results of the CAPPLE Project, an exploratory study in which an ad hoc questionnaire was used to determine the strategies and technological tools that final-year university students (n=2,054) use in their learning processes and communication. The questionnaire was validated with a triple procedure and a Cronbach's alpha of 0,944. The evidence obtained allows us to demystify the concept of the "digital native", since senior students integrated technologies to communicate in their personal and leisure spaces, but not too much in their academic activities.