Summary
4-year Quebec-wide digital literacy training through public libraries and community organizations. Project co-led between Techno Culture Club and Bibliopresto.ca; in partnership with Réseau Biblio du Québec, Association des Bibliothèques publiques du Québec, and Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Quebec.
Results
- The federal government received over 150 grant applications and ultimately chose 36 projects including AlphaNumérique.
- Over the course of the 3-year AlphaNumérique project, we trained over 12,000 participants across the province of Quebec in basic digital literacy skills with a $3M budget. This amounts to approximately one third of all participants reached through the federal program funding with about one tenth of the budget.
- The choice of workshop topics were initially chosen from a survey sent to all the major library networks of Quebec. Subsequent topics were identified by including input from workshop facilitators, requests from community organization partners, requests from workshop participants, and ultimately deciding as a team. It was nourishing to have such a broad range of inputs to feed the project evolution and to have the budget with which to continue developing new content.
- The program design initially planned for library personnel to play a key role in facilitating workshops. Because of numerous unexpected circumstances (funding delayed, COVID-19 pandemic, some organizational culture resistance to change) this became a much less important component of the project. This became an opportunity to identify new ways of inspiring and supporting library personnel in gaining confidence and ability to facilitate digital literacy workshops. The communication efforts, such as clear messaging, gathering testimonials, print-ready workshop catalogues, and a variety of live online events, all played a key role in inviting library personnel to participate more deeply in the program.