Digital Competence for All

Inclusion in today's society requires digital skills. Without it, it will be difficult, or impossible to apply for housing and work, shop when you are ill or a pandemic is raging, or apply for grants you are entitled to. Authorities counteract this through training and instructions on how to fill in forms, but despite this, today extensive manual efforts are required by, for example, the Swedish Public Employment Service's staff to help their clients with the digital. In this project, we want to focus instead on the very cause of the problem: the lack of digital competence.

The methodology on which we are based, question-based learning, has in previous studies proved to be effective even for people with lower levels of education. We are further developing this methodology, and will develop it further in this project, in order to streamline learning. Online education can be challenging, but there is good support in research that suggests that our proposed method could be even more effective and also more engaging, which would counteract some of the challenges with online courses. The preliminary experiments we have carried out ourselves with our methodology also indicate this. The question-based methodology also enables us to measure the participants' level of knowledge at the same time as they learn from the activities in the learning material. By collecting data while participants answer questions, the system can provide immediate individual feedback to participants. The same data can also be used by us researchers to evaluate how well the study material works. We will thus be able to work data-driven throughout the project.

We will do this by developing course modules on digital competence intended to be offered online to the staff at the Swedish Public Employment Service. As the time for on the job training is limited, it is important that the education is as effective as possible. The modules must therefore be developed with today's most effective online pedagogy. In the future (not part of this project), it will be even more important with efficient education as the learning modules must be possible to combine with other activities such as family, work (or job seeking), and other activities that compete for the same time.

The goal for the participants is an improved digital competence that will increase their inclusion in the digital society. If the project is successful, there is a great potential to include many more in the digital society as these modules can be offered on a large scale via the web.

Team - KTH

• Olle Bälter
• Andreas Jemstedt

At the Swedish Public Employment Service

• Petra Ornstein
• Erik Jönsson
• Alvin Gavel
• Natalia Oksimets

Financing

ESF

Project Period

Jan 2022-Feb 2023

Partner

Swedish Public Employment Services