sustainability Article Investigating Students’ Digital Literacy Levels during Online Education Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Banu Inan Karagul 1, *, Meral Seker 2 and Cansu Aykut 1   Citation: Inan Karagul, B.; Seker, M.; Aykut, C. Investigating Students’ Digital Literacy Levels during Online Education Due to COVID-19 Pandemic. Sustainability 2021, 13, 11878. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su132111878 Academic Editors: Barbara Motyl, Osman Titrek and Michele Biasutti Received: 6 September 2021 Accepted: 15 October 2021 Published: 27 October 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 English Language Teaching Department, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli 41001, Turkey; cansu.aykut@kocaeli.edu.tr 2 Faculty of Education, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, Antalya 07450, Turkey; meral.seker@alanya.edu.tr * Correspondence: banu.inan@kocaeli.edu.tr Abstract: COVID-19 has brought serious challenges to education and many other sectors. Within the educational context, the main difficulties experienced have been reported as challenges related to not only mechanical impediments—such as technology or infrastructure—but also to methodological and personal features, such as lack of motivation or online learning/teaching experiences. The abrupt transition from face-to-face to online education has created the need for some specific abilities, such as digital literacy on the side of the learners at all educational levels. In this context, this mixed-method study aims to determine the digital literacy levels of learners belonging to different school levels and whether age, gender and school degree were significant variables. This study also investigates the technology-related challenges students experienced during COVID-19 pandemic. The sample consisted of 510 participants representing different school levels, age groups, and genders; in addition, a smaller representative group (n = 30) revealed their own evaluations related to their levels of digital literacy and the technology-related challenges they had about online learning. The findings suggest that there is a statistically significant relationship between students’ digital literacy and their gender and school degree, while age was not found to be a statistically significant variable. The qualitative self-reported data suggested that learners have sufficient levels of digital literacy, and that the major technology-related challenges were reported to be lack of the necessary technologies and difficulties in adapting to a new approach to learning. Keywords: COVID-19; digital literacy; online learning 1. Introduction Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic, it has had a significant impact on many different sectors, the education sector being one of them. Different measures have been taken, e.g., the shutting down of schools and the use of social distancing precautions [1], and schools of all levels have utilized all of their available technical resources to continue their education online. Some countries tried to overcome this unexpected crisis through distance education whereas the others suffered from socioeconomic or digital infrastructure problems [2]. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 91% of students had to be away from their schools [3]. One hundred and eighty-five nations in the world have suspended face-to-face education, and have been in need of adopting alternative methods since 31 May 2020, which brought about the spread of ‘online education’. The use of computers and web-based tools in education has a long history and it has become prevalent thanks to the advancement of internet facilities, and these developments created the term ‘online learning’ [4]. However, the widespread use of online learning has revealed some challenges experienced by students [5–7] as well. A vast majority of students were blindsided in the face of such a drastic change in education [8], because basic qualifications were required for them without which their success in an online course would not be possible [9]. One of these necessary qualifications is digital Sustainability 2021, 13, 11878. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132111878 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability