People often tell us that some of the best learning happens in the ad hoc conversations they have with other practitioners in hallways or in breakout rooms at conferences.

• How can we mobilize the knowledge that we would share amongst ourselves in those informal settings?
• How do literacy practitioners learn from each other?

Those are the questions we are exploring at the Wayfinders Studio.

The Wayfinders are people just like you – and perhaps you – who are exploring, experimenting, piloting and reflecting on how digital technology can enhance learning in creative ways.

• Are you a literacy practitioner thinking about how you can respond to the ways that digital technologies are changing how we learn, work and engage in daily life?
• Are you wondering about what colleagues in other programs are doing?

Visit The Wayfinders Studio to see what others are doing and thinking about and make connections with colleagues.

Wayfinders 2020-2021

• About the Wayfinders Studio
• The Pivot to Remote Learning

Wayfinders 2022-2023

• Digital Storytelling Maker Space
• Community Gabfests

What some Wayfinders are saying about the studio

Are you wondering whether your next technology purchases should be laptops or tablets?

What operating system (Apple, Android, Windows) would work best in your program? 

Should you buy a new device or would refurbished devices meet all of your needs in both the short and long term?

Purchasing devices is an expensive endeavour, and there’s a myriad of options to choose from. AlphaPlus can help you plan and choose devices that best suit your needs and fit into your budget.

We can: 

• Provide you with information about the attributes of each device.
• Guide you through the decision-making process to ensure you find the solution that best meets your circumstances and needs.
• Support you as you learn how to create pages and use the management features that work best for the learners, staff and volunteers in your program.

The Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development (MLTSD) contracted Contact North | Contact Nord and AlphaPlus to:

• Engage and collaborate with the Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) stream and sector support organizations and educators, tutors, and learners to identify gaps and priorities for digital services and tools for learners, educators, and organizations.
• Provide a road map for enhancing the LBS system’s capacity to deliver more services remotely and expanding blended learning opportunities to serve more learners.

The goal of the digital capacity building consultation is to enhance the LBS system’s capacity to deliver more services remotely and expand blended learning opportunities to serve more learners. It will support and inform a broader ministry objective to develop a digital learning strategy that responds to the opportunities and challenges created by the program structure, streams and sectors.

As Ontario’s only organization focused on helping adult literacy education professionals to incorporate digital technology, we recognize the need for a more comprehensive and coordinated approach—an approach that respects individual program, sector and cultural differences and also provides a system-wide foundation.

Based on extensive review, consultation and our first-hand experience working with programs, we have identified these eight strategies to build a more equitable and inclusive LBS system that can provide learners with lifelong and lifewide digital instruction opportunities. We have taken a comprehensive approach, recognizing how elements within the LBS system interact and create conditions that both suppress and support digital literacy and technology integration.

The report contains details of each strategy along with examples of possible changes. We also frame the strategies with a research informed rationale focused on broader digital inequities.

1. Collaborating to ensure affordable data and devices for all learners.  
2. Developing an integrated and informative learning framework.  
3. Developing a blended learning approach and various models.     
4. Sharing diverse knowledge and innovation.  
5. Making sustainable investments in e-learning infrastructure.
6. Building people’s capacity for technology integration.
7. Designing responsive and equitable services, data collection and reporting.
8. Choosing performance measures (success indicators) that work for everyone.  

The strategies are not definitive and are a starting point for discussions that we plan to have this year with stakeholders inside and outside the LBS system.    

During the spring of 2020, all educational sectors, including Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS), made the shift to remote learning. The LBS shift was managed primarily at a local level. Comprehensive training, widely accessible instructional design expertise, tech support and additional funding to purchase data and computers for learners was not available. Each program made its own decisions.

How did programs adapt? What were their priorities? What were their challenges? This report, based on a short survey delivered during the last two weeks of June 2020, provides some answers, identifies challenges and raises concerns about the uneven impacts on learners and sectors and uneven access to resources that could be mobilized to manage the shift. The findings provide a basis for discussion and planning at both the local and provincial levels.

Fast Facts From the Survey Results

• 368 participants in LBS programs completed the survey in English and French.
• Respondents estimated that only 45 per cent of learners had household internet access and 27 per cent had limited connectivity using cell phones.
• Only 13 per cent of respondents said programs purchased additional data and/or devices for learners and staff.
• 67 per cent of respondents were able to focus on instruction; 33 per cent prioritized communication and supporting learners.
• On average, each respondent used three modes of communication and four modes of instruction to make remote learning work.
• 53 per cent of respondents participated in training and professional development.
• 66 per cent of respondents stated the top priority going forward was adapted accountability and reporting processes.
• 53 per cent of respondents said other priorities were (1) ensuring internet access for learners, (2) professional development and training using ed tech tools and (3) online assessments of literacy, numeracy and digital skills.

How does inequitable access to the internet affect adults in Ontario? What are the layers and impacts of our province’s “digital divide”?

We explore the answers to these questions in our research overview Ontario’s Digital Divide: A Spotlight on the Differences in Online Connection, Activity and Benefits.

Research highlights

Ontario’s Digital Divide was completed in early 2020 and is based on an analysis of the Canadian Internet Use Survey (CIUS) and other information. It looks beyond infrastructure, highlighting the ways in which income, age and level of education contribute to the digital divide. The overview reveals three interrelated layers of the digital divide, involving differences in:

1. How people connect to the internet.
2. The types of online activities in which they engage.
3. How they benefit from their interactions with services, resources and networks that are only available online.

If the Ontario government is to achieve its goal of making this an “inclusive, equitable and accessible digitally enabled province,” these three layers must be addressed.

Using this research overview

The ongoing and entrenched digital divide directly impacts adult literacy learners and others who could benefit from learning and training programs. Ontario’s Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) program works directly with digitally excluded adults with limited internet access and has a role in digital inclusion efforts.

This paper summarizes and highlights issues that are well-known to practitioners in the adult literacy education space. You can use it as a tool that supports your local advocacy efforts. 

In 2018, we decided that a guide on writing effective case notes for digital literacy training services would better support our work as coaches. 

We hoped that our guide and our record of how we developed it might be useful to others working in literacy and basic skills (LBS) as they develop, enhance or extend their own system of sharing information through case notes.

Our main finding was that case notes on their own aren’t a solution to the dilemmas in our work, but there are two outcomes of the project that will make a positive contribution to the field: case studies and reflective practice.

Case studies became the Wayfinders Studio and reflective practice became the Educator Network (eNet).

eNet

Join eNet to collaborate with inspiring educators and explore blended learning tools and approaches.

Wayfinders Studio

Join literacy educators who are experimenting, piloting and reflecting on how digital technology can enhance learning.

In 2017, AlphaPlus was asked by a sector membership group for information on options for digital literacy and basic skills (LBS) learner files and cloud – based storage.

The sector members identified a primary driver for the investigation as the burden of physically storing more than seven years of learner files. Space in multi-service facilities and school boards is in high demand , and file storage space allocated to LBS service providers can be significantly constrained, causing operational tensions and issues .

This investigation and report is only an initial foundational step. As stakeholder engagement and consensus building takes time, proposed models for thinking about how data is gathered, recorded, confirmed and stored have been provided as a starting point for the discussions.