Bridging the Digital Divide: A Practical Workshop on Digital Inclusion in Adult Education #ECIL2025

Sheila here, and the next workshop I'm blogging from the ECIL conference is Bridging the Digital Divide: A Practical Workshop on Digital Inclusion in Adult Education run by Violeta Trkulja and Juliane Stiller (Grenzenlos Digital e.V., Germany). The latter is a non profit organisation which aims for a joust, informed and inclusive digital society. They started by differentiating between equality (where everyone is treated the same) and equity (making unjust conditions into fair ones, so giving people different support to achieve eqity). I think they used this definition https://www.digitalinclusion.org/digital-inclusion-101/
They went on to talk about the term digital divide, which can be seen as a rather binary way of thinking about things. Unequal access, skills difference and differences in offline outcomes have been seen as different aspects of the digital divide. The presenters identified that now this is seen to simplistic a way of looking at things, and rather one would talk about digital exclusion and inclusion. They mentioned factors for exclusion and talked about digitally vulnerable groups (which might be "exposed to deeper new social and economic risks" through being digitally excluded.
In developing a programme, they have asked - what are the characteristics of the target group? how can we motivate, what are the competencies, how can we evaluate it? In terms of the courses, there needs to be 4 stages: recruitment, onboarding of participants, course format and support to guide people through the course.
Our activity involved adopting a persona of a target groups and address questions - what are the possible hurdles to participating in your course, what do you need to know about these? Which of the stages (see above) has hurdles? What do you need to do to overcome hurdles at each stage?