October 27, 2022
At a Glance
What remaining resources and approaches are most relevant for educators seeking to increase digital literacy and digital resilience for an adult learner population? These deep dives into the Digital Resilience in the American Workforce (DRAW) findings, from our national landscape scan on adult digital literacy, offer a closer look into resources and approaches for adult educators to use in the classroom. Explore the chapters of the DRAW landscape scan for a robust exploration of invaluable resources for digital literacy, instruction, and resilience.
Defining Digital Skills & Resilience
In this deep dive into chapter one of the landscape scan, we explore two themes: lifelong and life-wide learning and digital skills for employment. What do digital resilience and digital literacy mean? We explored this topic a bit in our blog, “Digital Digest: Putting Digital Literacy and Digital Resilience into Frame,” but this deep dive offers more context surrounding this topic.
Advancing Access & Digital Equity
As described in the DRAW Landscape Scan and blog “Advancing Access and Digital Equity” digital divides reflect longstanding inequities in American society, such as income and wealth gaps and uneven access to high-quality K-12 education. This deep dive shares findings related to advancing access and digital equity from the national landscape scan conducted for the DRAW initiative.
Instructional Approaches & Practices
This publication shares findings from the DRAW landscape scan and responds to questions raised in interviews with learners and practitioners about how educators can best support adult learners in developing the digital skills required to secure a better future for themselves. While the scan showed that the teaching of digital skills has increased since the onset of the pandemic, it also showed that there still is a great need for a more strategic approach.
Workbooks
To accompany Chapter 3: Instructional Approaches and Practices, the DRAW team created resources encompassing a list of tools that older adults, English learners, digital literacy learners, and others could explore to sharpen their digital skills; also, a list of digital instructional strategies to help guide educators in delivering instructional content.
Assessing & Validating Digital Skills
This deep dive into chapter five of the landscape scan thoroughly explores the practices and models for assessing digital skills and opportunities to improve assessment and skills validation in adult education. For further exploration into this topic, check out our Digital Digest Blog: Selecting an Assessment for Digital Literacy.
Practitioner Professional Development
Adult education leaders must look critically at the digital skills of their workforce and invest in effective professional development (PD) practices that enable practitioners to build their own digital resilience so that they have the capacity to integrate digital skills instruction in content. Research supports the need of adult educators to have strong digital literacy skills, an understanding of how digital platforms work, and the ability to effectively integrate technology in teaching and learning.
Methodology and Addendum
The DRAW team unearthed opinions about the efficacy of strategies and resources and their ease of use from a convenience sampling of Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) funded program staff. The learners, practitioners, policymakers, PD leaders, and workforce development stakeholders reached through a nationally disseminated questionnaire, focus groups, and interviews provided a glimpse of the effectiveness of current efforts on adult learning and outcomes, current needs and gaps in the digital literacy ecosystem, and promising efforts to close those gaps.