The rise of online modes of content delivery, termed e-learning, has increased student convenience and provided geographically remote students with more options for tertiary education. However, its efficacy relies upon student access to suitable technology and the internet, and the quality of the online course material. With the COVID-19 outbreak, education providers worldwide were forced to turn to e-learning to retain their student base and allow them to continue learning through the pandemic. However, in geographically remote, developing nations, many students may not have access to suitable technology or internet connections. Hence it is important to understand the potential of e-learning to maintain equitable access to education in such situations. This study found the majority (88%) of commencing students at the University of the South Pacific owned at least one ICT device and had access to the internet. Similarly, most students had adequate to strong ICT skills and a positive attitude toward e-learning. These attitudes among the student cohort, in conjunction with the previous experience of The University of the South Pacific in distance education, are likely to have contributed to its relatively successful transition from face-to-face to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This research paper examines the acceptance of technology for learning by senior secondary school students and university newcomers. The objectives of the study are to measure the computer competency, computer self-efficacy of selected student cohorts on the acceptance of technology for learning. The study uses the extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with two additional attributes, computer competencies and computer self-efficacies to examine students' behavior towards learning with technology. Two sets of data were collected; one was from Year 12 and Year 13 students from 33 secondary schools in Fiji, and the other from newcomers of a regional university in the South Pacific. The cohorts were surveyed with a unipolar Likert scale 1-5 questionnaire. The results were analysed using the "Statistical Package for the Social Sciences" -SPSS software and the proposed extended TAM model was analysed using the Smart Partial least squares (SmartPLS) software. The results from the regression analysis confirmed that the two attributes had a significant positive impact on the acceptance of the technology, that is, computer competency and computer selfefficacy were significant predictors of students' intention to continue using technology for learning. Therefore, a new model incorporating the two perfect scorers is designed and presented in this paper. The high values for Cronbach's alpha also show that the results were reliable and valid. Finally, the study shows that computer competencies and computer self-efficacies are essential contributors to the continuous use of technology for learning.

The seamless integration of new digital technologies into higher education teaching and learning has transformed education pedagogies and changed how students learn. The students are now required to have digital competencies to survive in the era of learning with technology; therefore, measuring the students' digital competencies is of utmost importance. This study evaluates the first-year university students' digital competencies at a higher education institute using a newly designed digital literacy measuring tool named digitlitfj. The digitlitfj is an online tool consisting of a 5 point Likert scale questionnaire ranging from 'No understanding' to 'Advanced level of understanding' that was piloted to the first-year university students. The results show that 86.15% of the students were average to very highly digitally literate. Also, Deep learning, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and Decision Tree algorithms in RapidMiner were used to evaluate the most important and influential variables in predicting an individual's digital literacy competency. The results show that all the variables utilized in the research were important, with computer literacy being the most influential variable in predicting an individual's digital literacy.

The individuals living in the 21st century have become the consumers of digital innovations and have to adapt, adopt and adapt to the new norm of surviving and thriving in the digital society. Familiarity with the latest technologies is not the only requirement for survival. One also needs to have relevant digital competencies to complete tasks with optimized outputs and efficiently deal with the chain of digital changes. The current study introduces the South Pacific digital literacy framework (SPDLF) driven by 6 essential literacies and sixty attributes. The study intends to provide a three-stage statistical validation for the South Pacific digital literacy framework. The three stages of validation include;(1) evaluating the strongest predictors of digital literacy from the six literacies in the SPDLF, (2) evaluating the significant predictors of each of the six literacies and (3) evaluating the significant attributes from a total of sixty attributes in the SPDLF. The results show that all attributes in the SPDLF are statistically significant, therefore, all attributes are significant contributors to digital literacy in the South Pacific digital literacy framework.

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