26 May All Digital Week 2021 supported 108,000 people to enhance their digital skills

26 May, 2021

2021 marked the 12th year of the Europe-wide All Digital Week campaign, which was more important than ever: Europe needs better digital skills to go beyond the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented humanity with a huge challenge to our known infrastructures – education systems, healthcare provision, social support, businesses and community cohesion. Society is tired of it all, and misinformation is one of the few things flourishing. At the same time, we have all been forced to learn new digital skills. New skills to continue learning, teaching, working, running a business, communicating with loved ones, and even discerning what information we can trust. According to Digital Economy and Society Index DESI, 42% of EU Population do not possess even basic digital skills, and with All Digital Week, we want to help them start their digital journeys and improve their digital competences and confidence to do it.

 

ALL DIGITAL Week 2021 was organised in partnership with: Europeana, Lifelong Learning Platform, Public Libraries 2030, and CEPIS, as well as ALL DIGITAL Members and their partners.

During All Digital Week hundreds of events across Europe supported educators to ‘be a digital hero’, boosting citizens’ employability, helping them to access healthcare and government services, increase their social connections, and counter disinformation. Events also helped businesses to become more resilient focusing on social media and efficient homeworking and showed schoolchildren and students the importance of digital skills, media literacy, and STE(A)M education, as well as opportunities presented by ICT-related professions.

Any organisation or individual could join the campaign by running a digital skills training or awareness raising event and adding it to the map of events.

Based, on the map of events:

• 440 events were offered by 140 partners
• In 171 cities and towns
• in 24 countries: Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and even India
• for 108,000 participants

The new country that was added this year was Ukraine, with their Ministry of Digital Transformation being the leader of the campaign in the country. Ukraine, along with Spain, were the most active participants this year, based on the information on the map of events.

In some countries, the events managed to be run face-to-face (42%), while most were still held online (58%), and others in a hybrid format.

As always, the majority of events were devoted to the topics of Basic Digital Skills and Media Literacy (43%) and Advanced Digital Skills and Employability (37%).

As for the target groups, the majority were school students (34%) and unemployed adults (25%), followed by general public (17%), trainers/teachers (11%), and university students (10%).

You can learn more about specific events by visiting the map, but also reading the blogs from our partners in Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, and Spain. We would like to thank all partners who organised events, and especially ALL DIGITAL members:

This year ALL DIGITAL organised a series of its own online events for over 860 people highlighting various aspects of digital skills training and presenting the projects that ALL DIGITAL implements with partners.

On Monday 22 March 2021 ALL DIGITAL launched its annual All Digital Week campaign with a high-level online stakeholder event titled “Digital Skills for a Stronger Europe” highlighting and discussing a range of topics relating to the importance digital skills in a post-pandemic Europe.

European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel, in her audio message provided her reflections on the work of ALL DIGITAL, the Digital Education Action Plan, and the funding of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Commissioner Gabriel noted, “Over the last 10 years you and the digital competence centres have made an extremely valuable contribution to the development of digital skills of European people making inclusion your motto. It is exactly on the point of not leaving anyone behind that I would like to focus. Your work supporting the 43% of Europeans lacking digital skills, helping them fully participate in the digital society is inspiring. And even more, so as you are widening the concept of inclusion, to reach out to all Europeans living in urban and rural areas.”

Stefano Scarpetta, Director for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at OECD, gave a keynote address with detailed statistical insights from the OECD on how, and more precisely who the pandemic has affected with further fascinating reflections on post-pandemic digital skills needs and trends.

A panel discussion then followed, which brought together high-level speakers from the EU Institutions, stakeholders and industry. Prof Achilles Kameas and Peter Palvolgyi moderated the discussion with the four panellists, asking a range of questions deriving from the Digital Education Action Plan and from ALL DIGITAL’s own Manifesto.

• Victor Negrescu MEP, Vice-Chair CULT Committee on Education & Training
• Veronica Mobilio, Policy Officer at DG Education, Youth, Sport & Culture, European Commission
• Simon Delakorda, Director of the Institute for Electronic Participation
• Angeliki Dedopoulou, Senior Manager of EU Public Affairs, Huawei
• Achilles Kameas, Chair of the Board of ALL DIGITAL
• Peter Palvolgyi, CEO of ALL DIGITAL

Read more about the event and watch the recording.

Another important event of the campaign was the launch of MyDigiSkills – a new tool to help users understand their digital competences. It is based on the work done in the DigCompSAT project, as delivered by ALL DIGITAL for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in 2020. The tool is based on DigComp 2.1, and it is anticipated that users will take around 20 minutes to complete the self-reflection assessment. The user will receive a personalised report on their digital competences that they can use to identify their strengths and weaknesses and identify the areas they could develop through training. At the time of the launch MyDigiSkills was available in seven languages: English, Spanish, Italian, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Romanian. By now four more are added: Dutch, French, Russian, and Ukrainian. The tool was launched on 23 March with an audience of over 100 people at the special webinar. During the campaign days, 1,400 people took the tests to check their digital competences.

Other events from ALL DIGITAL and our partners included:

• 22 March– Digital SkillShift webinar on re-skilling and up-skilling for online working
• 24 March – Smart-DevOps project webinar on developing skills for Smart City professionals
• 25 March – CDDC conference “Crowddreaming: Youth co-create Digital Culture”
• 26 March – STEAMonEdu webinar “Competence needs and professional development of STE(A)M educators”
• 30 March – Open-AE webinar on promoting open source technologies in non-formal adult education
• 31 March – Biblio webinar “Boosting digital skills and competences for librarians”

 

Read about the events, check speakers’ presentations, and watch the recordings by clicking on the links.

You can learn more about the campaign and specific events from each country, by visiting alldigitalweek.eu

Thank you for a successful All Digital Week 2021!
We look forward to the 2022 edition!