Digital competences and academic performance in university students: Non face-To-face education in times of covid-19 pandemic

The present research aims to determine the relationship existing between digital competencies and academic performance in students of the National Autonomous University of Huanta, Peru, during the non face-To-face education, 2020-2021. The way to teach using the distance education is more important nowadays, when the pandemic situation imposes the need to keep measures like the social distance among the people. We analyzed the variable "digital competence" and its dimensions, "information", "communication", "content creation", and "security and problem solving", as well as the variable "academic performance". For this end, we selected a sample of 209 students of the aforementioned university, using the stratified sampling method for three groups of students, namely, Administration of Sustainable Tourism and Hotel Management (ASTHM), Engineering of Agronomic and Forestry Business (EAFB) and Engineering and Environmental Management (EEM). We applied questionnaires and the collected data were processed by the Spearman s Rho correlation coefficient. The result was that there is a significant relationship between digital competencies and academic performance, with a significance level of 0.01 (bilateral), likewise the value obtained through Spearman's Rho coefficient is 0.416, indicating that there is a moderate positive relationship, equivalent to 41% average; concluding that university students need to improve their digital competencies to obtain a higher academic performance as far as the non in-person education is concerned.