Start Digital project : How to strengthen transversal digital skills (DigComp)?

Description

« No one can deny the importance of digital skills today. They are part of the key competences, necessary for every person to develop his or her full potential, employability and participation in society.»

The efp and the sfpme took part in the Start Digital project, a European multi-partner project including the main players in vocational training in French-speaking Belgium. This project aimed on the one hand to raise the level of acquisition of transversal digital competences of the teaching teams and learners and on the other hand to set up a reinforced collaboration between the training structures to promote the diversity of the teaching approaches, to mutualise the tools and to support the teaching teams.

Within the efp, the Start Digital project has contributed to the implementation of a vast plan to strengthen the basic digital skills of learners and teaching teams :

• The engagement and assignment of an institutional digital mediator whose role was to develop a digital culture within the centre and to accompany, on the ground, the teaching teams in the increase of their skills.

• The creation of a cadastre, i.e. an inventory of the digital skills covered in all the training programmes, through an analysis of each skills framework in the light of the European Digital Skills Framework (DigComp 2.1).

• The reinforcement of training courses through the integration of transversal digital competences from the DigComp framework directly into the training reference frameworks. This strategy adopted by the efp aims to integrate digital skills into the existing training offer in a sustainable way. It is planned that all the reference systems will include digital skills by 2024.

• The development of training and educational resources (DigComp and DigCompEdu awareness documents, a detailed DigComp reference framework in French, etc.) for educational teams, which can be accessed on a sharing platform;

• The co-organisation of a Creathon for the educational teams of the Start Digital project partners. The Creathon is a collaborative educational activity, in teams, organised during one day, which aims to produce a deliverable to promote the increase in digital skills of target audiences. For this first edition, the educational teams had the opportunity to produce a microlearning on the theme of responsible digital .

• The design of a digital skills positioning tool, adapted to the reality of the centre, based on DigComp. The tool is intended for people who are far from the digital world and directly integrates remediation paths. At this stage, the tool has already been completed by 25% of the trainers and it is planned to submit the positioning tool to learners in 2022-2023.

Points of interest

• The collaboration between institutional digital mediators from different institutions allows for the discovery and sharing of tools and the development of common productions.
• The strategy of integrating digital skills directly into the training reference frameworks makes it possible to directly link digital skills with professional and transversal skills.
• An objective inventory of digital skills based on the job-related training frameworks and the results of the positioning tool used by the teaching teams made it possible to prioritise the resources to be created and the training to be provided to the teaching teams.

Points of vigilance

• Digital skills are not stable skills, acquired once and for all. Several training repositories that currently integrate digital competences from the DigComp 2.1 framework may already have to evolve in the coming years .
• The fluid integration of digital competences in the trade training repositories requires time and the collaboration of many actors (educational advisors, trainers, digital mediators, trade experts, etc.).