How to Design an Intervention to Raise Digital Competences: ALL DIGITAL Week - Dortmund 2018

摘要

The article describes and evaluates a local campaign to support digital skills of marginalized persons. Due to the increasing digitization which is taking place all over the world, it becomes necessary to support the expansion of people's digital competences and close the "digital gap" that causes multiple disadvantages for certain groups of people. In March 2018, eleven students of Rehabilitation Science at University of Dortmund (Germany) conducted five different courses for disadvantaged persons in Dortmund. The courses lasted around two hours and aimed at raising awareness for the potentials and pitfalls of digital tools used in the everyday life of people from different target groups. In total, 417 people attended these courses, mostly 6 to 10 participants per course. The article describes the best practices in designing, developing, conducting and evaluating these courses. An extensive survey (338 participants) is used to analyze successful means in delivering courses on IT topics to diverse target groups. The student activities were linked to the "ALL DIGITAL Week", a pan-European campaign that organizes courses in 25 countries with more than 92,460 participants. The "Get Online Week" Dortmund 2018, which is part of the European "ALL DIGITAL" campaign and carried out in Germany, is listed as an example in this article, to show how a project to raise digital competences can be designed and what is essential for a successful implementation. The article closes with recommendations for conducting alike interventions in other circumstances.