Critical analysis of digital information literacy of faculty and administrative staff during the pandemic

Abstract EN

Objective: This study aims to investigate the digital information literacy skills for the consumption of information by Kuwait University faculty and administrative staff regarding the coronavirus.

Methods: The online questionnaire was the instrument used to collect the data with the convenience sampling method from faculty and staff in the College of Social Sciences at Kuwait University during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kuwait.

The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS 25.0) was used to analyze the data of 105 participants.

Results: The findings indicate that 61.9% of the participants have joined online workshops in digital resources literacy during the pandemic.

Similarly, 50.5% of the respondents agreed that digital resources were valid for gathering information, 59% agreed that digital literacy was impactful for obtaining genuine information, and 85.7% had the desire to improve their digital literacy skills.

Administrative staff and participants with a diploma were more likely to apply knowledge to prevent the coronavirus spread and more likely to access digital information resources.

Conclusion: Dependence on online sources requires users to develop analytical skills for interpreting source authenticity.

Overall, the research contributes to analyzing the reliability of digital sources for acquiring informative content on the coronavirus pandemic.