Hello, I am working on developing an online Digital Health Literacy course for low-income adults in Richmond, CA. The curriculum seeks to enable learners to use the internet to find and use health information related their personal physical and mental health, navigating the healthcare system, and supporting the health of their families and communities. I have reviewed the previous posts and found a lot of great resources, thank you! But, I'm wondering if any of you are aware of any resources that are specifically focused on addressing both digital literacy and health literacy through an online format? Any advice you have would be much appreciated!
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Dear Ellen:
Greetings! Ellen, I just sent a welcome message to you and, lo and behold, I found your post while reviewing the month of April! First, let me point you to a resource that might help. It is in the LINCS Resource Collection under Health Literacy.
Health Information Literacy Outreach: Improving Health Literacy and Access to Reliable Health Information Online in Rural Maine
The above resource is a study but about halfway down the profile page is a link to curriculum source book. That should have more details for you.
You may also find the following tutorial helpful: Evaluating Internet Health Information, on the MedlinePlus website.
What have you thought about covering so far?
Cynthia
Hello Cynthia,
Thank you for sharing these helpful resources! I am in the process of meeting with all of our project collaborators, which include local CBOs, health clinics, and City agencies, so the curriculum is still under development. But, I will certainly post details as they become available. I look forward to continuing the discussion on digital health literacy resources and best practices.
Thank you,
Ellen
Hi Ellen:
Thank you for staying in touch. I think group members will be interested in your curriculum development goes and how your collaborative process works. It seems like it would produce a very relevant, customized curriculum for your students. Is that the idea?
Cynthia
Dear colleagues:
In case you aren't on the Learning and Technology COP, here is an additional post addressing Ellen's question about digital health literacy resources. It is from David Rosen:
April 28, 2015 - 9:47pm
Hello Ellen,
I am guessing that you are part of the City of Richmond's LEAP program, working with some great people who have been working with digital literacy for some time. If so, I believe you have the Learner Web there and, if so, you may know that it has a well-developed BTOP-funded digital literacy curriculum, and lots of experience with using it. You may also know that that the Learner Web project at Portland State University in Oregon is developing an online health literacy curriculum for adult learners. There was a COABE 2015 conference presentation about that last week. Let me know if you would like contact information for someone who can tell you about this.
Fortunately there are many health literacy experts in our field. Those who come to mind first include: health literacy researcher and practitioner, Andrew Pleasant; professional development specialists, Julie McKinney and Sabrina Kurtz-Rossi; teacher and professional development specialist, Kate Nonesuch; adult learner health literacy advocate, Archie Willard, and Greg Smith and his colleagues at the Florida Literacy Coalition; there are many more, some of whom are on the LINCS health literacy CoP, which I hope you have also joined.
As you probably know, there are several intersecting sets of skills that learners in a digital health literacy project need: literacy and numeracy skills, digital literacy, and health information searching skills. There are also several good online resources for low-literate adults once they get comfortable with using websites, some of which, such as Healthy Roads Media, have audio files, and often in several languages.
A very useful free compendium of resources, from World Education, with a focus on U.S. materials is Family Health and Literacy http://www.healthliteracy.worlded.org/docs/family/
You will find links to a digital literacy skills assessment, and several free digital literacy instruction sites on The Literacy List at http://home.comcast.net/~djrosen/newsome/litlist/complit.html
I learned the most important thing about health literacy many years ago from Archie Willard, who told me that when adults urgently need health care information for themselves, family members or friends they need good, understandable information, not education or training to get it. The urgency of a health situation may require that a health care team provide information in ways that the person can understand, regardless of whether or not s/he can read, use a computer or other digital device, or know how to judge the quality of information from the web. The time for health digital literacy is when it is not a health emergency, so that if there eventually is one, the person has the literacy, numeracy, digital literacy and technology, and comfort with web searching and "judging the source" skills to find -- and evaluate -- the information needed.
Let me know if you need contact information for the people whom I have suggested.
Anyone, what have I missed that might be helpful to Ellen?
David J. Rosen
Technology and Learning CoP Moderator
djrosen123@gmail.com