ICTSKILLS4ALL – EMPOWERING OLD CITIZENS FOR A DIGITAL WORLD

In our transforming society, a lack of digital skills in the elderly population is synonymous with social isolation, inability to access information and services including health services, loss of autonomy, and an increased sense of inadaptability.

ICTSkills4All - Empowering old citizens for a digital world aimed at fostering digital skills, self-confidence and online safety of adults aged 55 years and over who have minimal or no engagement with digital technology, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

The project developed an ICT Learning Programme comprising a dedicated online platform with information, training tools and resources, plus face-to-face support using inter-generational (university students helping the elderly) and peer-to-peer (elderly with digital skills assisting those without) approaches, piloted in four partner countries: Portugal, the UK, Latvia and Poland. In each pilot country, two pilot groups were run - one testing each methodology - each involving 20 older adults, plus 5 teenagers per group in the inter-generational pilots and 5 more digitally skilled older adults per group in the peer-to-peer pilots.

The short-term impact goal was to train at least 160 elder adults without digital skills.

ICTSkills4All aimed to explore and test innovative practices and effective approaches for educational programme design and delivery to support digital-skills acquisition among 55+ citizens with limited or no digital knowledge. No formal evaluation was conducted to determine which methodology (inter-generational vs peer-to-peer) performed better.