March 2025

Author: Michelle Thompson

Prepared for AlphaPlus

This research project was commissioned to better understand the barriers, drivers, and structural realities that shape how LBS practitioners participate in professional development (PD) across Ontario. Through focus groups and interviews with 30 individuals representing delivery sectors and cultural streams, we heard consistently about the conditions needed to improve PD access, engagement and impact. A literature review was used in a complementary way to shape discussion topics and corroborate recommendations. The report offers a suite of interconnected recommendations, each designed to address the structural barriers that limit PD participation. Dedicating service delivery dollars without addressing these broader factors is unlikely to produce the desired outcomes — and may reinforce the very constraints the sector is working to overcome.

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a comprehensive global assessment of adult skills, testing literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving. The initiative, managed by the  Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has taken place each decade since the mid 1990s. The 2024 results provide insights about particular adult skills and how they have evolved over the past decade. Assessment data, combined with extensive background questionnaires, provide insights about skill outcomes and skill development.

This overview and commentary synthesizes key findings from OECD reports and a presentation, offering an overview of Canada’s performance. It highlights OECD developed implications for adult learning policy, and provides some guidelines for messaging that programs can use. It also clarifies lingering misconceptions about people’s performance on the assessment, specifically at lower levels, and shares OECD findings related to people’s abilities to meet everyday literacy, numeracy and digital demands.

Read our concise report to understand the latest PIAAC results and their significance for adult learning and skills development in Canada.

The Digital Inclusion Playbook is filled with ideas, information and resources you can use to support local digital inclusion efforts. We hope the site builds awareness at a provincial and national level on behalf of all literacy and basic skills (LBS) programs and the many learners who find themselves excluded from full and equitable participation in a digital society. 

Resources, articles and mini-infographics you can use

Digital inclusion and literacy development work together, and LBS plays a key role in digital inclusion as a provider of digital learning opportunities for adults. LBS educators, volunteers and program co-ordinators are on the front lines of digital inclusion work and often address issues — such as access to devices for learning and low-cost internet plans — that go beyond everyday teaching and learning work. The playbook’s facts, resources, articles and mini-infographics can be used to:

Information, ideas and strategies to help build awareness

Digital inclusion is bigger than LBS and involves affordable and adequate broadband internet service, internet-enabled devices that meet the needs of the user, quality and affordable technical support along with applications and online content designed to enable and encourage self-sufficiency, participation and collaboration. The playbook contains information, ideas and strategies that explore the following topics:

We invite you to explore the site and share your feedback with us. We’d also love to hear about your digital inclusion initiatives and stories.

You can also contact Christine (Christine@alphaplus.ca) or Alan (Acherwinski@alphaplus.ca) directly. 

When students receive their own computer — and it’s really theirs — it sends a strong message. You don’t just own the computer; you own your education and your own future.

Alison Canning, executive director of Let’s Get Together

Access to Technology

Literacy practitioners know that limited access to technology can create insurmountable barriers for lifelong learners in Ontario.
Learn more about the issue of access to technology

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

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.

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. 

A cross-case analysis of six community-based programs in Ontario’s Literacy and Basic Skills system

In 2018, AlphaPlus oversaw a cross-case analysis of digital inclusion and digital literacy development in six community literacy centres in Ontario, which receive funding from the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development (MAESD) Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) program. The literacy centres, situated directly in small towns, cities and remote communities throughout Ontario, play a key role in supporting the province’s digital transformation initiative and its commitment to ensure an “inclusive digitally enabled province.” The centres provide various learning opportunities for digitally marginalized adults — adults living in poverty, the unemployed or precariously employed, those with limited education and some older adults. They use various models of digital literacy development to respond to learners’ array of digital literacy experiences and aspirations. However, this work is not currently part of a broader provincial digital inclusion strategy. In addition, professional development opportunities and educator training are inconsistent across the system. LBS eligibility criteria and enrolment targets can interfere with the ability of community organizations to be fully inclusive and responsive to digitally marginalized adults, particularly older adults and those not actively looking for work.

Wondering what the research says about equitable digital access and learning opportunities for the adults we work with?

AlphaPlus recently completed a comprehensive report focused on equitable access to technology for all Ontarians. During the webinar, Christine Pinsent-Johnson, one of the authors of the report, shared some highlights and a few takeaways that programs may find useful as they develop their own digital literacy workshops, courses and overall strategies.

Topics include

In Ontario, our government is transforming how it collaborates with the public and provides services by migrating many everyday interactions and transactions to an online platform. This e-government service initiative includes a commitment to provide opportunities for people to advance or gain new digital skills, particularly to individuals most in need of digital literacy training. As those in the adult education sector know, a digital divide and lack of technology training persists in Ontario and in Canada. For many Ontarians, the cost of an Internet connection puts access out of reach. When Internet access is available disparities in education level, literacy, technical skills, online problem solving and access to digital learning supports contribute to the divide. AlphaPlus’ synthesis review project sought to examine existing literature to better understand effective and comprehensive digital literacy learning, as well as inclusion opportunities for current and future users of e-government services.

The report details the results of a literature review and a jurisdictional scan funded by the Ontario Human Capital Research and Innovation Fund (OHCRIF) in 2016-2017. This project explores what it means to be an inclusive and digitally enabled province, and to support Ontario’s vision for advancing digital literacy skills for those in need. Because of the digital literacy strategy currently under development in Ontario, this research was an ideal opportunity to look at promising policies, programs and practices designed to create an environment of digital inclusion in other jurisdictions.

Assessment Challenges, Contradictions and Inequities: An analysis of the use of digital technology and OALCF Milestones

Christine Pinsent-Johnson
Matthias Sturm
2015

See the Research Brief.

See the Full Report.

See the Presentation.

The report explores the following four themes: