Digital Champions for Community Success

In an age of digitalisation of almost every aspect of our everyday lives, these adults are even more isolated and either dependent on external help or just excluded from participation in society. Of course the picture is not entirely catastrophic, there are provisions to assist vulnerable adults, but they are far from adequate. Often the approach is to solve their immediate needs, instead of empowering them to solve their needs by themselves and have a sense of achievement.

 

Digital Champions for Community Success aims to create a Training Package for adult educators, trainers and carers who work with vulnerable adults in different communities.

The Training Package will have three main aims:

1) To be a self-learning tool for adult trainers and carers on how to design and implement effective strategies for enhancing the basic skills of vulnerable adults – digital, literacy and numeracy.
2) To develop adult educators’ competences to deal with diverse groups of learners, making use of new technologies and teaching outcomes – using online and offline adapted learning tools
3) To embrace a new methodology of fostering “Digital Champions” when adult learners become support champions in their own communities, helping their peers and motivating them.

 

This project is innovative on several levels:

• Adult education sector – new approach of delivering and improving the retention of basic digital skills
• Learning methodology – the Digital Champions for Community Success methodology is a catalyst to any training programme delivered by support organisations to vulnerable adults
• Learning content – the self-learning modules offer an interactive way of exploring this new methodology
• Skills development – after completion of the self-learning modules, educators will have gained new work skills, but most importantly the vulnerable adults will gain from the new methodology
• Access to information – vulnerable adult learners will be able to access online services such as online banking, government services, and also this improved access to information online will help them make better consumer choices.
• Geographical context – this project will benefit all the partner countries and the wider EU in different ways depending on the local situation.