Digital Literacy in Rural Areas
The adoption of digital skills among the rural population of Armenia is a subject left out of public debate and the public educational system. However, both digital access and digital use skills are equally crucial, and need to be addressed simultaneously. The project “Digital Literacy in Rural areas” aims to provide training courses with experts specialized on various areas of digital literacy to teach different segment groups of the project the necessary digital skills.
A huge number of the population in rural areas of Armenia have a lack of digital knowledge and skills. Thus, they are left behind in integration with new technologies.
The project “Digital Literacy in Rural areas” aims to provide training courses with experts specialized on various areas of digital literacy to teach different segment groups of the project the necessary digital skills. This includes digital literacy, digital consumption, digital competencies and digital security.
The training has 3 blocks: computer literacy, basic knowledge of hardware and software; internet literacy including cyber hygiene issues; and social media literacy including running personal and business pages.
Using the rural areas library network in the country, the Project will outreach to various segments of the population to be involved in these training courses. The thematic experts will have face to face meetings with participants in 5-8 regional libraries with 15-30 participants in each location during 6-8 weeks. The meetings will be organized on weekends to ensure larger participation and full commitment to the project.
Technical equipment and catering will be provided by the project.
After the roadshow is completed, an online meeting with additional thematic experts as panelists will be organized to cover all emerging questions among the participants.
During the face to face meetings, apart from the training, the Chapter leadership will make a presentation about the objectives and activities of the Internet Society Armenia Chapter and invite participants to join the Chapter.
We don’t have a special target based on interest, age or gender. We aim to invite members and attendees of rural libraries, keeping the target audience as wide as possible.
The Armenia Chapter has its social media channels in Facebook and Twitter. We would mostly use them as well as the official website to attract participants into this Project. After the completion, we will widely share the results not only via the social media, but also via members' mailing list and other means of media.