Diachronic research on the time of internet use for academic tasks by Spanish-speaking university students in the pre-COVID era

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic forced the digitalization of education to be accelerated to continue the teaching–learning processes in confined populations. The irruption of this fact caused the evolution that had previously been occurring in the integration of digital technologies, and in general information and communication technologies (ICT), in education to be distorted, as their use multiplied exponentially in a few months. However, it is interesting to know how integrating these media and tools in the educational world evolved without having mediated an anomalous event such as the pandemic. This article studies the time university students in Spanish-speaking countries spent using the Internet for educational tasks in the pre-COVID era to determine whether this use was homogeneous in this common geographical and cultural space. Knowledge of these behaviors is valuable for analyzing their relationship with the then-current processes of ICT integration in higher education. It can serve as a basis for comparative studies of these trends and what happened during and after the pandemic. Among them is determining whether specific ICT integration strategies were not pedagogically adequate due to the situation’s urgency. The analysis of this study was descriptive and inferential statistics, based on the survey method with the application of data mining using software R. It was carried out over seven years (2012–2018) and applied to a sample of 2482 students from seven countries. The findings obtained have allowed us to determine that the use of the Internet by Spanish-speaking university students, in general, increased significantly over time in the pre-COVID era, in parallel to a more significant presence in educational processes, with conditioning factors in each country depending on its economy and political and social situation.