Media competencies among university students in Colombia

Young people are exposed every day to a greater quantity and variety of media, platforms, and content, in a communication ecosystem that gives them the possibility of accessing multiple tools and resources to consume and to produce and disseminate content; all this makes it necessary to have the skills to interact in this context in a conscious, critical, and responsible way. The objective of this study was to establish the level of media competence of students from seven universities in five regions of Colombia, through research with a quantitative approach, of a non-experimental nature and a descriptive transectional design. The result allowed to identify a medium level of media competence in students, with some differences between the six dimensions analyzed, which indicates that there are gaps and weaknesses that raise the need to strengthen media literacy processes in Colombian university students so that they can better exercise their role as citizens of the 21st century.