Have you been thinking about offering test preparation for the new Canadian Adult Education Credential (CAEC)? Do you need help supporting learners as they prepare to take these tests?  As we kick off the academic year, we have a new guide to help you.

In the spring of 2024, the Canadian Adult Education Credential (CAEC) was released. This new credential replaces the GED® for Canadian adults seeking a secondary equivalency. While the CAEC offers important and useful changes from the GED®, it requires significant teaching and background knowledge, and the transition to a digital platform has implications for both test-taking and literacy. Until now, little support has been available to build teachers’ knowledge so they can assist learners.

New guide available: Preparing for the Canadian Adult Education Credential (CAEC)

AlphaPlus is pleased to unveil a new, comprehensive guide to help you learn about the new CAEC and support adult learners. The guide includes teaching tips, curriculum planning outlines, lesson routines, and other resources. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll find inside:

Check out this brand-new guide and get up to speed with the digital, content, and cognitive complexity changes you will need to understand to support learners with the CAEC.

Additionally, please let us know your thoughts on the content of the guide so far and what you’d like to see added. We welcome your feedback! Complete the form to let us know what you’d like to see in the guide. 

Open educational resources (OER) discovery series email tour

Are you passionate about teaching adult learners — and having the best tools to do it?

Join our email-based tour of the AlphaPlus Open educational resources (OER) collection. This is your opportunity to delve into a library of open and modifiable resources carefully curated and vetted by your fellow Ontario adult literacy educators.

Sign up today to unlock:

Join our OER discovery series

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Don’t miss out. Join your fellow educators who are already benefiting from these valuable resources. Sign up for the discovery series today! 

Have you met Christine Pinsent-Johnson and Guylaine Vinet? They’re the AlphaPlus team members behind the open educational resources (OER) collection, an online library of resources that you may already be using.

The story of the collection began a few years ago. In response to the need for digital materials that adult literacy instructors could use with remote learners during the pandemic, Christine and Guylaine started exploring available resources. They discovered a range of free materials being developed and distributed, including open resources that could be modified for educational purposes.

Their exploration evolved into a project to build an online library of open resources. Tapping into Guylaine’s library science expertise and Christine’s background in teaching as well as co-ordinating and supporting educators, they collaborated with an advisory group of Ontario literacy professionals from community and school board programs, representing both urban and rural settings.

Today, the OER collection boasts over 200 educational resources for adult literacy teaching, many of which can be adapted to suit your needs. Read this interview to learn more about the collection and to meet the team behind it.

OER collection: Interview with the team

Q: How do you hope educators will benefit from using this collection?

Christine: Over the years, there’s been a significant change in publishing and resource access. As adult literacy educators, we used to receive a catalogue of resources from booksellers. You would simply search through it, and the work of curating, purchasing and sharing was handled. Today, all of that has disappeared, and finding resources, assessing their quality and building a personal collection is extremely time-consuming. We’ve taken on the searching, curating and organizing work to provide a tailored and ready-made collection specifically for adult literacy educators in Ontario.

Q: How did you decide what resources to include?

Guylaine: The working group confirmed our initial criteria to guide curation decisions and told us what they needed: modifiable and open resources focusing on the core domains of reading, writing, digital skills, mathematics and numeracy. We established that instructional resources had to be free, modifiable, reproducible and ready-to-use and had to include teaching tips and guidance.

At first, the open resources we found were mostly academic and didn’t meet the needs of our audience. So we looked at who might be publishing what learners need. Christine was very proactive, contacting the organizations directly. We discovered that valuable, relevant materials that instructors don’t have the time to explore and uncover are available. We reviewed and evaluated hundreds of options, but only select resources were included in our collection.

Q: What are some of your favourite resources in the OER collection and why?

Christine: Phonics — if you’re looking elsewhere, you might end up paying for a comprehensive package. But we found two completely free, open, comprehensive examples that we included in the collection. And the collection from Decoda in British Columbia [please verify] was a wonderful surprise: a comprehensive set of modifiable, open workbooks.

Guylaine: We’re also hearing that instructors are excited about the sections on basic math, empowering learners, literacy development supports, and resources to update educators’ skills and knowledge.

Are there any innovative or unique aspects of this collection that you’d like to highlight?

Christine: Two things stand out. Because websites change — for example, they move or are taken down — we’ve made modified resources available in a Google Drive collection. The other is the traffic light (red, yellow, green) system we developed to help users distinguish between copyrighted, shareable and modifiable resources.

Q: What are your plans for adding to or evolving the collection?

Christine: The collection is currently quite comprehensive. When we receive suggestions, we often find they’re covered. However, we recognize that many of the resources are PDF workbooks designed for pen and paper, so we’ve been considering making them more interactive to encompass learning and digital skills and support hybrid learning.

Q: What advice do you have for educators using the collection for the first time?

Guylaine: Make yourself a cup of coffee and browse like you’re flipping through a catalogue, starting with where your interest is. Start where your question is, for example, Is there anything for reading and intermediate learners? Begin with your most pressing question or issue and as you browse, you might find other helpful content.

Q: What else do adult literacy educators in Ontario need to know about the collection?

Christine: Access to good content is only one part of the AlphaPlus approach. We think a lot about how to help adult literacy educators use content and knowledge. This project aligns with our philosophy of leveraging technology and tools, modelling what can be done and supporting educators in integrating products into their programs. We’re here to support you further through our services.

Explore the collection: Sign up for the guided tour

Are you ready to explore the OER collection?

We know the collection is vast and you might need help getting oriented. That’s why we’ve created an email-based guided tour starting in March. Learn more and join us for the OER discovery series.

During the summer, a small group of researchers and GED instructors did an in-depth analysis of the CAEC sample tests to identify the main changes on the CAEC compared to the GED. 

Based on our analysis we describe three main changes:

  1. Digital changes with the new online testing platform, test questions and sources to read and interpret
  2. Content changes in reading, writing, science and social studies, including questions without sources (math has fewer changes) 
  3. The use of a cognitive complexity framework that emphasizes the application of conceptual knowledge and skills rather than the recall and reproduction of facts.

The CAEC is a very different test compared to the GED! Preparing learners means educators will need 

We’d like to share what we’ve learned about the CAEC in a comprehensive report, presentation video and accompanying slides.

New CAEC resourcesarrow
  1. What are literacy educators’ classroom goals?
  2. What professional development and resources are your peers seeking?
  3. How are reporting and compliance requirements impacting your capacity?

We asked these and other questions in a recent survey, and I’m writing today to share what we learned with you.

What adult literacy instructors are saying about their experiences

Earlier this year, AlphaPlus conducted research to inform our strategic planning and product design work. We wanted to better understand the priorities and needs of literacy educators as we continue to shape our programs, services and training opportunities. Through our online survey, we heard from 328 teachers and practitioners from community-based, school board and college settings. We also conducted phone interviews with nine teachers and six sector leaders. Thank you to all who took the time to provide input.

The research has helped us to understand your needs, challenges and desire for support in areas including:

Here’s a sampling of what we heard:

See the survey summary for more details about what your peers had to say about their experiences.

Survey summary

AlphaPlus: Strengths, challenges and future effectiveness

We also asked you questions to understand what you most value about AlphaPlus. You mentioned our:

We learned that to support you effectively in the future, we need to leverage our strengths to address the day-to-day needs of your students and classrooms. We need to listen continuously to the changing challenges you face. And because practitioners are experiencing pressure due to restricted funding, heavy administrative loads and measurements that aren’t shifting with changing student needs, we must advocate for changes that impact the practitioner level.

Shaping our future approaches to supporting educators

Your survey responses are already informing our strategic planning and service design, ensuring the decisions we’re making now align with educators’ needs. This sometimes means documenting frameworks for what’s already in place. For example, we’ve already offered advisory groups, training and communities of practice, which we’re now organizing more formally. Your feedback is also influencing decisions about changing the types of support we will offer or increasing the amount of support available.

Digital environments are changing much of what adult literacy educators do, including lesson planning, creating learning environments and managing online spaces. Technology is not a separate element; it’s impacting everyone’s work. The good news is that our collective understanding of the impact of technology on our work is much richer and more varied now than it was five or 10 years ago. As a field — and at AlphaPlus, an organization supporting the field — we’re ready and open to continuous adaptation and improvement.

Would you like to learn what your peers had to say about teaching adult literacy in Ontario? See the survey summary here.

We recently added numerous ready-to-use instructional activities to our open educational resources library. You’ll find activities in various formats including interactive PDFs, digital activities, online modules and slide presentations. Nearly all resources can be reproduced and most can be modified. Modifiable resources allow you to adapt the content to meet your students’ needs and reflect their situations.

We’ve also made it easy for you to build your collection of instructional materials by setting up folders on Google Drive that contain many of the resources. You’re sure to find at least one new gem that you can add to your personal collection. 

Check out the new topics!

  1. Job preparation and hiring is focused on instructional materials that can be used to help learners explore and prepare for employment. It also includes up-to-date information on automated tracking systems (ATS) and writing a resume that won’t be screened out. 
  2. Test and exam preparation is focused on instructional materials that can be used to introduce learners to content related to first-aid/CPR, WHMIS, safe food handling, G1 driver’s test, Canadian citizenship test and Red Seal exams.

We hope you find something useful. Also, if you have any questions about making modifications, organizing the materials in your own folders or anything else, get in touch (info@alphaplus.ca). We’re here to help.

If you are using a great resource that meets our inclusion criteria, please share it so we can add it to the collection.

We’ve started working on the final two topics: 1) learner empowerment and 2) resources for educators. We’ll let you know when they’re finished.

Back in June, I shared the news that AlphaPlus was about to embark on a Skills for Success funded project that would bring together a group of literacy and basic skills (LBS) practitioners to co-create a suite of resources conceived through the pedagogical lens of lesson planning and technology integration. As the project lead, I’m delighted to announce that we’ve assembled a dynamic working group of adult educators from across the sectors in the anglophone stream and that we’re already in full collaboration mode! 

Bottom-up, collaborative approach to enhancing digital delivery

This motivated group of adult educators brings their pedagogical expertise, teacher wisdom and seasoned frontline experiences to the co-creation arena, setting the stage for a bottom-up collaborative process that will formalize their collective professional insights and knowledge into a product that can benefit both educators and learners in the field. It is indeed action research — research rooted in practice and in problem-solving around the challenges and opportunities of lesson planning for blended learning. 

The core working group members are:

The secondary working group members (due to professional or time constraints) are:

Conceptualizing and co-creating a PAL for the field

Our working group has been meeting monthly since late July and is committed to co-developing a suite of resources through collaborative action research whereby, together, the practitioner group members interrogate how they plan their lessons and how they meaningfully integrate technology into their activities and lessons. They’re looking at “the how” of lesson planning and “the why” of activity choices and tech tool choices that serve to enhance blended learning — online or face to face — with a contextualized sensibility to the readiness and the needs of their LBS learners.

For now, we’ve taken, quite fondly, to calling ourselves the PAL working group. (Yes, “Planning a Lesson” does transform handily into a catchy acronym — educators love their wordplay.) Ultimately, the PAL suite of resources will encourage and showcase the power of a well-thought-out lesson flow — a flow that organically strengthens foundational and soft skills by virtue of engaging teaching practices and active learning opportunities.

Stay tuned for future updates. If you have any questions or comments about this project, please email me at olga@alphaplus.ca. 

This year, I’ve been reaching out to literacy and basic skills (LBS) educators to gather front-line perspectives on technology integration, mainly through the lens of lesson planning and teaching practices. It’s clear that the field has shifted from emergency remote delivery and is now steeped in fresh insights, approaches, lessons learned and a desire to collaborate — that’s where our new Skills for Success project and the opportunity to co-create planning tools and curricular supports comes in!  We’ve given you glimpses of this project in Alan’s January message and when the team introduced me in March. Today, as we wrap up the consultation phase of this work and get ready to move into the next phase, I’m reporting back on some key findings and project directions.  

Key themes that emerged from speaking with educators

Through focus groups and one-on-one conversations, I’ve spoken with 23 adult literacy educators and nine program administrators from local programs and school boards in Ontario. Your peers — whether they’re back in the classroom, teaching online or using a hybrid model — are looking for creative ways to incorporate meaningful technology into their sessions, based on an understanding of the engaging flow of activities that makes a good lesson and organically hones skills that adult learners bring. 

We’re hearing that many of you would welcome planning routines that are pedagogically sound, thoughtful and deliberate ­— that consider variability in the learners, in their devices or digital access and in their needs. Educators want planning templates and routines that are modifiable, grab-and-go, easy to reuse, complement a predictable lesson flow and are focused on relevant, practical topics.

Several additional themes emerged from our conversations, including the following:

 Materials to help integrate technology into a lesson flow for learning

As we move into the next phase of co-designing materials, we know that we need to consider learners’ needs, differentiated instruction principles and the variety of group dynamics within a session (online or face to face). The co-designed lesson-planning companion resources that will be created, therefore, can’t be prescriptive, but would make engagement through digital integration that enhances learning and self-direction a key focus. Curriculum in the form of workbooks, open educational resources (OER) and modules are already out there — you’ve indicated that you need resources that guide decisions about effectively planning lessons that have an impact.

We also want to highlight existing AlphaPlus supports that can meet some of the needs you’ve identified. For example:

Next step: Co-creating a blended-learning lesson-planning flow

We’re now ready to start building a new product: a blended learning flow that addresses technology integration, thinking routines, lesson planning and stages, engagement strategies, collaboration, reflection and problem-solving. We’re now assembling a small working group that will finalize our initial concept and co-create the product, drawing from their experience with what’s exciting about engaging lessons.

AlphaPlus will contribute expertise (for example, on blended learning, pedagogical models and existing research), participate in co-creation, facilitate the process in the lesson planning stage and provide an online platform for the materials that are designed. This co-creation process will be beneficial and instructive for our field — it’s an opportunity to learn from each other in thinking about our planning routines and how they strengthen blended learning.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project so far. If you’d like more information or are interested in participating in the paid working group, please email me at olga@alphaplus.ca.

READ THE KEY FINDINGS

From scanning paper documents to searching for available electronic substitutes, in 2020, adult literacy instructors scrambled to digitize their teaching manuals and tools. A sector with a long history of relying upon binders and books on shelves struggled to avail itself of quality digital teaching resources, and the AlphaPlus team discovered the extent of the challenge.

“During the pandemic, we noticed instructors’ difficulties with getting content and resources to learners electronically. At the same time, we realized the potential to leverage technology to open up more equitable access to free, quality literacy and numeracy resources,” explains Christine Pinsent-Johnson, policy and research specialist in education and technology at AlphaPlus. “We started experimenting with several solutions, including creating and curating online resources through HyperDocs. However, the response told us we needed a different, more collaborative approach.”

Working group complements research and library expertise

Christine and her colleague Guylaine Vinet, organizational development specialist in education and technology, started exploring the idea of open educational resources. While well equipped for digital library building — Christine as a researcher and Guylaine as a librarian — they recognized the value of forming a working group to shape their project’s scope, approach and contents.

“We started with a basic idea and knew we needed user guidance regarding the project’s viability, format choices, how we should organize materials and the relevance and usefulness of what we were assembling,” says Guylaine. “For educators to use the resource, we needed to know what works best for them.”

Christine and Guylaine assembled a group of instructors from school boards and community groups, representing urban and rural communities across the province. Members work in program areas ranging from workforce development to academic, with diverse learner groups.

The working group first met in May 2022 and started by forming terms of reference and the optimal formats for resource curation and sharing: Google Drive and a microsite. In June, the group established criteria for resources to be included. For example, materials must:

Be free and ad-free.

With the scope defined and a full suite of parameters established, Christine and Guylaine began their search of over 100 collections and lists from Canada, the U.K. and Australia. They gathered resources that met the criteria and involved the working group in content review. One working group participant, Karin Meinzer, instructor for the West Centre at PTP Adult Learning and Employment Programs, reflects on her experience:

“As an instructor, there aren’t many day-to-day opportunities to connect directly with colleagues in the field. I always like to say yes to projects such as this because of the exposure it gives me to new ideas and things happening outside my tiny sphere!” 

Working online has made me hyperaware of the limitations on sharing published materials. Good, open-source material is hard to find, and it’s even harder to come by the time and the skills needed to assess the usability of materials. I am so glad that Guylaine and Christine are evaluating materials for the field and organizing them in an accessible way.

Karin Meinzer

Open educational resource prototype now available

The result of the working group’s efforts to date is not simply another collection of resource links but a fully vetted collection of workbooks, modules and activities that address a full range of instructional topics. A prototype is now available covering the first two of 10 topics the working group identified: (1) reading instruction workbooks and modules and (2) general knowledge content. The prototype will be delivered in English, with research underway to explore a French option.

“This working group has created a good opportunity for educators to get together, talk with each other over a shared interest and produce a body of work. All educators in Ontario will soon be able to access a library of open educational resources ready to download, use and save,” says Christine. “Having input from the working group made us more confident about the end product, and the success of this experience means we will be looking for working groups in the future.”

Let us know what you think of our open educational resources prototype. Do you have suggestions for additional resources? Would you like to participate in future steps as an educator advisor? Get in touch with us.

Postsecondary Digital Skills Readiness Assessment Tool

In 2018 a college upgrading instructor came to AlphaPlus with an idea. 

He had developed an assessment tool to determine whether learners were ready for the ways they would be using digital technology as college students. He wanted to enhance that resource and make it available to all LBS instructors.

Six other Literacy and Basic Skills college instructors joined him and worked with AlphaPlus and the College Sector Committee for Adult Upgrading to determine the digital technology skills that learners need as they enter postsecondary education.

The working group developed assessment tools that college LBS/AU programs can use to help assess their learners’ digital skills readiness for transition to post-secondary studies.

Learners can try out their skills and knowledge in a quiz and in a set of holistic assessment activities for Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel. There are two versions of each of the holistic assessment activities that cover the same set of skills in different contexts and that can be used as a pre- and post-assessments.

If learners find that they need to work on a particular skill or suite of skills, we have collected learning resources to help with that on this site:

Postsecondary Digital Skills Readiness Places to Learn