The European Commission announced the New Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) on 30th September2020. The Digital Education Action Plan aim for resetting education and training for the digital age.
The DISK Project, Digital Immigrants Survival Kit is one piece of the puzzle of this action, especially the strategy as below on Enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation (strategy 2). The DISK Project aims to develop missing digital competences of adults, with a special focus on so-called „digital immigrants“, i.e. people who are disadvantaged in society due to a lack of digital competences and to enable them to take an active role in the digital society. We live in a digitalised world. Tasks that used to be done on paper are now done on a digital basis – for example contact with authorities, tax returns, travel and booking systems, shopping and other tasks. To be able to understand and perform such tasks, digital competences are crucial as society becomes increasingly digital. This is why European Commission has launched the DigComp framework for citizens. Digital competences need to be learned by users, as they include not only knowledge but also experience, skills and attitudes. Without digital literacy, people will be excluded from society. Learning digital competences requires not only external motivation but also the feeling that users can feel engaged and be more independent citizens. In a technically and digitally dominated environment, inclusion requires that people feel able to use digital tools and resources for their own purposes in a useful and safe way. Many adults, despite their ability and integration in other areas, need support to become competent and confident in using digital tools.
The objectives with the ISK Project are to create, implement and evaluate 15 modules teaching various specific topics related to everyday life covering digital competencies as a “Digital Immigrants Survival Kit” (DISK), to use flipped learning 3.0 as the training approach, to create an innovative self-evaluation tool based on competency-based self-evaluation mandalas, to create a transferability and implementation guide, to transfer the results and outcomes in a flexible way in other European countries and finally to publish the modules of the DISK Toolkit as Open Educational Resources (OER).
The Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) outlines the European Commission’s vision for high quality, inclusive and accessible digital education in Europe. It is a call to action for stronger cooperation at European level to
- learn from the COVID-19 crisis during which technology is being used at a scale never seen before in education and training
- make education and training systems fit for the digital age
An open public consultation on the new action plan ran between June-September 2020.
The new Action Plan has two strategic priorities
1. Fostering the development a high-performing digital education ecosystem
This needs
- infrastructure, connectivity and digital equipment
- effective digital capacity planning and development, including up-to-date organisational capabilities
- digitally competent and confident teachers and education and training staff
- high-quality learning content, user-friendly tools and secure platforms which respect privacy and ethical standards
2. Enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation
This needs
- basic digital skills and competences from an early age
- digital literacy, including fighting disinformation
- computing education
- good knowledge and understanding of data-intensive technologies, such as artificial intelligence
- advanced digital skills which produce more digital specialists and also ensure that girls and young women are equally represented in digital studies and careers
The action plan 2021-2027 can be downloaded from here