What do Australian universities want in student ICT skills?

This paper reports on a study that sought to identify the information and communications technology (ICT) used daily in Australia higher education institutions (HEI). Four hundred and one educators from fourteen Australian universities ranked the importance of sixty-two ubiquitous and emerging hardware, software and online applications to determine what student ICT skills were necessary to successfully complete their particular curricula. These sixty-two skills were apportioned according to their common usage and divided into ten categories: communications & email; content management systems (CMS); database management; graphics; hardware; interactivities; multimedia presentations; research; spreadsheets; and, word processing. This paper presents quantitative data collected on the use of these ten categories across the faculties of Arts, Business & Commerce, Education, Health Science, Library & Research, Social Science and Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). The study revealed that students need advanced ICT skills in seven of the ten categories to successfully engage in university studies. Keywords: ICT skills, International Students, Foreign Students, Australian Higher Education