Abstract
What digital skills do tomorrow's higher education students have? Can we talk about a paradigm shift in skills, knowledge, and learning strategies? This paper is based on extensive data from a national survey on digital practices in primary and secondary education. These students are born and raised in the digital era with smartphones, social media, and online games. However, findings indicate that the twelfth graders seem to be quite traditional when faced with their own learning strategies, as many prefer pen and paper over keyboard and screen. The seventh graders have to a larger extent been trained in using digital learning tools and seem to prefer digital approaches over lectures with pen and papers. There is a notable positive development of digital maturity among students in the last six years. The proportion of twelfth graders that spend their time on non-academic activities on computers in class has halved. Also, reported disturbance from computers in class has decreased for all students. Twelfth graders report extensive use of computers during most of their classes, but they have less use of creative tools than their younger counterparts, e.g., movie editors, animation apps, and computer programming. The twelfth graders will meet academia in 2020, while the seventh graders follow five years later. Different blended learning approaches could motivate and engage tomorrow's students. Lecturing and handwriting seem to be more applicable for the forthcoming students, but more interactive solutions could be needed to engage the ones that enroll higher education in five to eight years from now.