Co-designed digital education in rural areas

ongoing

Rapid digital transformation has influenced education, work and life and the Covid-19 pandemic has only highlighted more the divergences linked to digitisation in some territories, especially between urban and rural areas, and the need for innovation in education to respond to these challenges. For this reason, Our Digital Village aims to intervene in rural areas by promoting the acquisition of digital and transversal skills, preparing people to face the challenges of the future. It will do so by co-creating high-quality educational content that responds to the needs of the local context, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term transformation towards digitalization through active awareness raising on all levels of society. Through self-analysis workshops, the intrinsic motivation to change will be explored, and the needs of each local context will be identified. These will be taken in mind while co-designing the educational materials, followed by a training for teachers and trainers to ensure their capacity to implement the co-designed activities with their learners. In the testing phase of the educational materials, ICT courses will enhance the competences of young and adult learners, while consolidating the newly acquired skills of teachers and trainers. In order to build qualitative tools that can have a long-term impact not only in the communities involved, but also beyond the project consortium, a series of participatory evaluation tools will be developed and deployed throughout the project’s lifetime, as well as tailored activities to promote the project’s impact and results locally and internationally. With the direct involvement of people from rural communities as well as political actors - who will be part of the project processes since the beginning – the project shall promote a bottom-up participation approach that can bring a long-lasting impact on education and rural communities.