BackgroundAccessing the internet and benefitting from its opportunities for information research, e-commerce, communication and participation became self-evident for most people in the last decade. The internet has transformed almost every aspect of private, public and professional live. People are finding jobs, organising daily life, communicating with relatives and friends or are searching for individual information. However 18 per cent of Europeans aged 16 to 74 never used the internet and the biggest group of them consists of adults older than 65 years. Objectives / Impact"Connect Seniors to the Digital World" aims to promote participation of elderly people in society through getting in touch with online services and applications supported by the usage of tablets. As the usage of tablets supports an intuitive way of operating and exploring it is a suitable device to empower elderly people. The target group of the project are multipliers and staff members of non-formal learning settings, like community centres, libraries or social institutions. At least 40 multipliers and staff members of non-formal learning settings - 10 per each participating country - will take part in the test period of the project. Those will be qualified through a training which focuses on the usage of tablets and their opportunities to address elderly people. They will learn how to provide services and how to support the beneficiaries - elderly people – of the project by using those devices. Further 120 elderly people - 30 in each participating country - will benefit from new services within the piloting period. Thus, elderly people have the opportunity to learn the usage of internet and application through using intuitive devices while being coached by multipliers and staff members of non-formal learning settings. Further the project will involve stakeholders from welfare organisations - at national and European level - in order to activate and enrich the debate of how to support senior citizens by using ICT services. The project improves the participation of elderly people in social live and will increases the quality of educational services that partner organisations are delivering to society.Content / ResultsThe project consortium will analyse the training needs of multipliers as well as the interests and expectations of senior citizens according to the internet in all participating countries. Based on those findings a learning concept and a learner centred curriculum with innovative methods of social work for senior citizens will be developed and piloted within the project. The curriculum and learning concept will be under a creative comment license so all materials will be published as OER. The online learning environment supports multipliers and staff members in developing services within their institutions. It provides link recommendations, video and learning materials adapted to the needs of multipliers and staff members. Further the project will provide guidelines for implementing the approach on organisations and institutions based on the piloted trainings. Additionally it will develop recommendations for the European transfer of the approach. On national and European level, stakeholders will be involved in the project from the beginning.
Background and aim of the project Digital media is essential for communication and participation in today’s information society. Although senior citizens can benefit from digital opportunities, they are still the population group which is often not yet online. The project “Connect Seniors to the Digital World” (CSDW) therefore aims to empower senior citizens to use tablet computers independently and to benefit from this usage in their daily life. The objective of the project is to create a comprehensive training offer for staff and volunteers of institutions and sites where senior citizens can be supported in the use of tablet PCs. The need for such a training offer had been identified in the German project “Digital mobil im Alter” (Digital mobile in old age - https://digital-mobil-im-alter.de/), which lends tablet PCs to retirement homes and sheltered housing institutions and is conducted by the Digital Opportunities Foundation (SDC) in cooperation with Telefonica Germany since 2012. The Digital Opportunities Foundation is the coordinating organisation within this strategic partnership. The organisation aims to create the prerequisites needed for all people to become part of society and to shape it actively. It became clear that senior citizens need continuous support when using the mobile devices and that it is best when the support comes from people they know and that are around anyway – the institutions’ staff and volunteers. Additionally, the Association Rural Internet Access Points (VIPT) in Lithuania realized that there was a need to support seniors to enter the digital world. The goal of this organisation is to enable local individuals and institutions to build key elements of a modern and vibrant society through the promotion of new information and communication technologies (ICT), the expansion of resources that enable access to the Internet and through improving the quality of education. Two other strong and experienced partner organisations were involved in CSDW, the “Centre for the Innovation and Development of Education and Technology” (CIDET), Spain, and “Educating for an Open Society” (EOS), Romania. CIDET is focused on e-learning, understands technology as a tool, methodology and models. EOS aims to bridge the digital divide in Romania by helping people realise their full potential through the use of technology and works in a country, where the percentage of senior citizens who are not online is one of the highest throughout Europe. Project outputs The four partner organisations conducted a small-scale study to collect information about: what senior citizens would like to do with tablet PCs; for what they need support; the training needs of the staff and volunteers of institutions for seniors (digital-seniors.eu/index.cfm/secid.265/key.242). 383 people above the age of 65 and 335 multipliers and 40 decision-makers of public education institutions (e.g. libraries) or institutions for senior citizens took part in the surveys that were conducted in January and February 2017. A course was created on the basis of the study’s results and on a blended learning approach (digital-seniors.eu/course). Within the project, the course was piloted with 47 participants in the four partner countries. The course included three face-to-face training sessions, two online workshops and eight weeks of self-learning on the online learning platform Edueca (www.edueca.eu, hosted by CIDET). The course, available in English, German, Spanish, Romanian, and Lithuanian on the online platform, was developed to contain all learning materials and content. Thus, it can stand alone after the duration of the project as a training offer for multipliers – without the need for face-to-face sessions - as well as a supplement for trainers of multipliers. Complementary to the course, the project partners developed guidelines, in which they evaluated and summarized the experiences from the first implementation of the blended learning course in four countries. The guidelines are available in the four partner languages and in English and provide good practices, convincing arguments and helpful recommendations to multipliers and decision-makers for setting up and conducting a training and supporting offer that empowers senior citizens in using tablet PCs in non-formal learning settings (digital-seniors.eu/index.cfm/secid.265/key.336). Furthermore, the partner consortium provided recommendations for organisations all over Europe about how to use the manifold project outputs to implement a training offer for multipliers in their countries, regions and cities (digitale-chancen.de/assets/includes/sendtext.cfm?aus=11&key=1569&pkey=2&dltype=2). In order to increase the attractiveness of the course, the videos that the participating multipliers recorded with their target group were published with English subtitles. To give a quick overview of the course, a handout with information from the main results was published in project languages.