Age Action’s Getting Started is a free digital literacy programme, helping older people to get online, or use their smart device with confidence. Age Action’s Getting Started is the first competency-based digital training for older people in Ireland. It uses the EU’s DigComp framework as the foundation blocks of the curriculum, building the capacity of older people to engage with technology safely. Every older learner is matched with their own volunteer tutor to work with them over five weeks on the skills they want to develop, at a pace that suits them.
Age Action’s Getting Started classes take place in community settings around the country, such as libraries and family resource centres and in the offices of some of our corporate partners.
Currently in Ireland, three in ten older adults are not using the internet. Of those adults who are using the internet almost half of them do not have ‘basic’ digital skills. This means that 62% of adults over 60, or 637,285 people in Ireland are digitally excluded. Age Action’s Getting Started supports digital inclusion of older people which is an important aspect of Digital For Good: Roadmap for Digital Inclusion in Ireland.
The innovative competency-based Getting Started allows older people to develop the ability to adapt to the ever-changing tech landscape. Age Action’s Getting Started focuses on five key areas of competencies and uses these as ‘tools’ to address any difficulty a learner might come across. The five areas of competencies are:
- Information and data literacy
- Communication and collaboration
- Digital content creation
- Safety
- Problem solving.
Competency-based means that during the course learners should test their knowledge through practical application of their improved skills.