Online Assessment Web App for Adults 55+. The Digital Facilitator's Guide

The importance of digital competence has grown significantly in recent years, with technology playing an increasingly critical role in our personal and professional lives. Digital competence refers to the ability to use digital tools, devices, and platforms efficiently and effectively, including the ability to critically evaluate and use digital information. In today's digital world, digital competence is no longer a desirable skill but has become a necessity. The ability to navigate the digital landscape confidently is crucial for staying informed, connected, and productive. Therefore, assessing individuals' digital competence of adults 55+ has become increasingly important to ensure they have the necessary skills to succeed in their personal and professional endeavours.

This guide was developed as part of the Erasmus+ project “DIFA - Digital Facilitator for Adults 55+”, implemented by a consortium of four partners from Romania, Spain and Turkey. The project aims to develop, test and implement an innovative digital education ecosystem with supportive tools to let educators create, share and adapt attractive learning activities for the development of digital skills of adults 55+. In doing so, the DIFA55+ project provides a comprehensive formative objective assessment of digital competence across five DigComp competency areas. In essence, the guide describes the process of developing, piloting and reviewing the “Everyday Digital Skills for Adults 55+” web app.

In line with the objectives of the DIFA55+ project, the research consortium developed and implemented a methodology in Chapter 1. The methodology includes the development and deployment steps undertaken to meet ambitions for the impact and sustainability of the project. This approach was taken to ensure that the app development is aligned with the project's overall goals and objectives.

In Chapter 2, the researchers from TEAM4Excellence (Romania), Voluntariat Pentru Viata (Romania), Formative Footprint (Spain), and Saricam Halk Egitimi Merkezi (Turkey) contributed to the development of assessment questions, answers, and advice. This stage followed the methodology implemented in Chapter 1 and aimed to ensure that the assessment questions are aligned with the project's objectives and are suitable for evaluating the digital competencies of adults aged 55 and over.

Chapter 3 of the DIFA55+ project provides a detailed guide on how to use the “Everyday Digital Skills for Adults 55+” online assessment web app. The chapter begins by explaining how to access the webpage and navigate to the relevant section for taking the assessment. It then walks through the process of taking the assessment, providing tips on how to answer the questions and showing examples of what the explanations of the correct and incorrect answers look like. The chapter also explains how to view the results and get the Certificate of Achievement, which shows the participant's score and their performance across the five DigComp competence areas. The Certificate also provides a radar plot, which visually displays the participant's strengths and weaknesses across the different areas, allowing them to identify areas where they may need to improve. The chapter is accompanied by screenshots that demonstrate the step-by-step process of using the assessment web app.

In chapter 4, the "Everyday Digital Skills for Adults 55+" online assessment web app was piloted with 268 participants, and 187 of them provided feedback via a Google Forms survey. The survey included questions about the web app's usability and NPS questions to rate and provide feedback on the app. The feedback collected from the pilot study was analysed and used to improve the assessment web app, ensuring that it better meets the needs and expectations of its users.

Following up on the web app development, piloting with seniors 55+ and implementing necessary changes/improvement, the project partners organised seminars with adult educators in order to present the web app, its features and results as well as to discuss potential real-life application in classroom and online training settings, which were described in Chapters 5 and 6. The participants in these seminars included adult educators and trainers, staff from elderly care centres and managers of adult education institutions with the below distribution per project partner.