Hi everyone!
Nearly two months ago, CrowdED Learning "soft launched" a free Digital Skills Library designed to bring together resources from various sources into one place to help learners develop foundational digital skills. Here is a link to the blogpost announcing the library, as well as a link to the webinar we held in January to walk people through the library.
The library is a work in progress, and is not intended to be a "curriculum." More so, in the spirit of the work CrowdED Learning is doing, it is intended to be a directory/library that provides learners with options to choose what resource works best for them for learning a new digital skill / reviewing one they may need to refresh. However, in order to make the library as relevant as possible (and before we do too much more), I'm hoping folks can take this 7-10 minute survey to help direct us as to what areas we should be focusing on and how best to organize and present the learning resources within the library.
In an effort to not take up too much of your time, feel free to stop here and—if you are interested in helping us and have time—please take the survey. If you'd like some background re: why we want this feedback, please continue reading :)
As has been stated by many on here, and something I firmly agree with, digital skills should not be taught in isolation; rather, they should be developed through real-world activities and through tasks that require digital problem solving. For example, I don't envision learners just going to "Word Processing" within the Digital Skills Library and peeling through resources to learn about how to use Microsoft Word. Rather, it would make more sense for the learners to have an activity or task they need to accomplish—such as creating a résumé in Microsoft Word—and as part of that to be directed to specific resources that could help them with the skills they need to demonstrate as part of successful completion of the activity. Sort of like this:
The idea here is that while the library might be organizing skills and resources that teach those skills as discrete sets of content, these become more effective when they are built into a task or problem that has been posed to learners that has relevance to them.
So, that's about it....what are your ideas for how we can organize the Digital Skills Library to be as useful as possible to learners and instructors? If you can't take the survey and prefer to toss some ideas around in the comments thread, that's great as well! Just trying to make sure we are spending our time building things that are really needed in the field.
Thanks so much, everyone :)
Comments
I'm not working directly w/ our adult ed folks now but I'll forward it to them!
Jeff, I hope you have a great response to the valuable survey you posted. Let us know what results you have once the survey phase is complete.
You are so right that "digital skills should not be taught in isolation." In fact, especially among adults, no skill should be taught in isolation.
WIOA's recent emphasis on integrating academic skills in occupational contexts (job prep) supports that approach. Of course, not all Adult Ed programs are funded by WIOA, but the concept behind providing occupational contexts for teaching academic skills (and vice-versa) is sound. Perhaps that could be one path developed in your library so that instructors might find support in developing activities and plans for their students. Leecy
I watched the replay -- EXCELLENT presentation, Jeff!!! This is exactly what I've been trying to do over the past 5+ years for our ESL program --- gathering useful resources together into one spot --- but I hadn't made much headway at all. Thank you for sharing the library with us and I hope we can put it to use in the very near future in our program.