The Digital Learning (DLIS) project is an Erasmus + Cooperation project between 5 countries, which aims to increase the skills of social work professionals and students in digital uses and tools, so that they acquire sufficient digital agility to support social action audiences in situations of digital divide. Launched in November 2021, the project will involve researchers, teachers, educational managers, trainers, digital designers, students and social work professionals until August 2024.
OBJECTIVES
Train social workers to master digital uses so that the people they support can take advantage of them and become autonomous. For formal recognition of both the role and the function of social digital mediation by social workers.
IDENTIFY
people affected by digital exclusion and support them in developing their digital skills, to promote their inclusion in society and reduce social inequalities.
RECOGNISING
Broad recognition of the ‘role’ of digital mediator among all social work professionals and trainers throughout Europe.
FIGHT
against the digital divide and the social inequalities it generates, which can be observed throughout Europe.
The results
As part of a European initiative to combat social inequality and develop digital literacy, the DLIS project is providing practical ideas and training to raise awareness of the issue among social work professionals.
It has produced three results:
- An academic report on the digital divide and digital agility,
- A reflective guide for learners and professionals,
- 4 distance learning modules on digital social work.
DLIS is a transnational cooperation project that enables practices and experiences to be pooled in order to find European digital solutions to the challenges of dematerialisation for professionals and the public they support. This pooling is helping to create a shared culture of social work professions in Europe.
The main thrusts of the DLIS Project :
- Taking stock of training needs in the project countries by diagnosing the digital agility of social work students and professionals through the production of a digital agility index,
- Identify the specific needs of professionals in order to train them and reduce the digital vulnerability of beneficiaries,
- Modelling learning systems that meet the functional, ethical and legal needs of professionals, with a view to combating the inequalities resulting from the different digital divides experienced by people receiving support,
- Create transferable tools and practical guides for professionals in Europe.
The DLIS project also aims to enhance the skills of students and professionals through various learning systems designed and developed from the ground up. Until now, strategies to improve the digital skills of social workers have been based on personal and/or organisational initiatives, and have mainly provided ‘case-by-case’ responses. The effects of these strategies seem limited: a broader framework is needed to encompass support for vulnerable groups in the full complexity of today's digital and paperless environment. The project's focus on the social work professions, with their specific apprenticeship schemes, is aimed at improving the quality of support for vulnerable people who are digitally (and socially) excluded.
Social work students and professionals need to develop solid digital skills, as they are exposed to a public in need of digital support. But they also need to develop reflexive skills specific to their field of action, social work. In Europe, the dematerialisation of public services and the digitalisation of everyday life and of the economic and social environment, accelerated by the COVID 19 pandemic, have underlined the urgent need to train social workers to support people who are ‘remote’ from the digital society. The dematerialisation of administrative procedures, which is accompanied by the closure of physical reception counters for users, poses new challenges for social action, by increasing the risks of a breakdown in access to rights (Défenseur des droits, 2019). In this context, social workers are faced with new challenges and missions. New groups of people who were previously independent in their approach are turning to them because they are having difficulty using the digital interfaces of government departments and commercial services. The shift in the role of social workers towards providing support for online procedures for the public has largely taken place ‘without a professional mandate’ and ‘without training’, leading to ‘confusion’ and a ‘lack of self-confidence’ among professionals (Mazet and Sorin, 2019). Indeed, many social workers themselves are finding it difficult to get to grips with digital tools whose interfaces are evolving rapidly.
DLIS IN PICTURES (video in French)
