Abstract:

Introduction:
Society is becoming more reliant on digitalized services, for instance, to get a doctor appointment, to buy a train ticket, paying taxes, etc. However, large segments of the population lacks the necessary skills to interact effectively with such digitalized services. Such groups include seniors and migrants.

Traditional digital literacy training currently involves face-to-face teachers since the usual training material (MOOCS, etc.) is not suitable for those without the most basic digital skills. However, often this face-to-face training has limited effectiveness. The typical training in groups has plenty of logistic (participants with different time availability) and pedagogical (participants with different learning speed) problems, and trainers are sometimes ill-equipped to deal with individuals not only experiencing digital illiteracy but also experiencing low literacy.

Innovative digital literacy training:
The TEDECO (Technology for Development and Cooperation) [4] group of the UPM (Technical University of Madrid) [5] has been working in projects related technology and education in developing countries since 2006. TEDECO research is oriented to adapt new technologies applications and methodologies to the characteristics and constraints of developing countries.
After years of experience [6] in traditional digital literacy training we have perfectly identified the main economic and logistic problems arising and we have worked in the way of solving them. This was the origin of our digital literacy training methodology that tackles the problems with traditional digital literacy training by offering individual training based on self-content audiovisual material without face-to-face teacher. It is called TechPeopleCare methodology [3].
The participant is offered two screens: one showing a video about the skill they are about to acquire, and another, virtually identical screen, in which they simultaneously practice this skill at their own pace. As is it skill-based (and not operation system based) previous experiences with this training has shown that the transferability of skills (e.g. opening files, clicking with a mouse) is effective and suitable for individuals with low literacy. The videos are language-tailored to the audience, for seniors at rural areas is very important to develop the materials in the local language (their mother tongue).

Conclusions and future work:
Our training method plus their mobile infrastructure is a promising solution to take the technology and the digital literacy to disadvantaged rural areas.
Our work has been recognized by entities such as AMETIC [1], which represents the digital technology industry in Spain. Our initiative was one of the four finalists in the Digital Skills Award Spain 2018 in the ”Digital Competences for All” category.

References:
[1] AMETIC, https://ametic.es/en
[2] DIGOPPS, Digital Opportunities Project, https://digopps.wixsite.com/digitalopportunities
[3] TechPeopleCare, http://www.techpeople.care
[4] TEDECO, Technology for Development and Cooperation, https://tedeco.org
[5] UPM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, http://tedeco.org/
[6] Silvestre, M., Muñoz-Hernández, S., Angel Rubio, M.: A successful entrepreneurship formula for solving computer illiteracy. In: 2014 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC). pp. 318–324 (10 2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/GHTC.2014.6970299

Keywords:

Digital literacy, training for citizens, training methodology, digital inclusion, digital gap reduction.