MobiDig is a solution that encourages and supports civil society organisations to offer digital skills classes to hard-to-reach people, such as homeless people, vulnerable young people or the elderly. MobiDig promotes mobile outreach and aims to boost motivation and retention in learning basic digital skills. We believe that mobile outreach is the way to promote the social inclusion of the most vulnerable people in our society.
National
Belgium
Belgian Federal Territory: Brussels, Flanders, the Walloon provinces.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): DigitAll - Alliance for Digital Inclusion in Belgium (represented by BNP Paribas Fortis) Type of organisation: A coalition of companies, civil society organisations and governments (no legal entity yet) First name of representative: Yasmin Last name of representative: Scibilia Gender: Female Nationality: Belgium Function: Project Officer Public Affairs Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Warandeberg 3 1CC7C Town: Brussels Postal code: 1000 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 2 565 55 25 E-mail:yasmin.scibilia@bnpparibasfortis.com Website:https://digitall.be
Name of the organisation(s): Tree Company Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Erwin Last name of representative: Berghmans Gender: Male Nationality: Belgium Function: CTO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Jozef Hermanslei 45 Town: Mortsel Postal code: 2640 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 479 98 30 22 E-mail:erwin@treecompany.be Website:https://treecompany.be
Name of the organisation(s): Toyfoo bv Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Thomas Last name of representative: Laureyssens Gender: Male Nationality: Belgium Function: Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Lange Van Ruusbroecstraat 139 Town: Antwerpen Postal code: 2018 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 477 58 54 58 E-mail:t@toyfoo.com Website:https://toyfoo.com
Nowadays, digitalization is often a prerequisite for participation in society. Unfortunately, not everyone has the opportunity or the skills to use these digital tools. The digital divide affects some groups more than others. MobiDig is a solution that stimulates and supports existing social organisations in providing digital skills lessons to hard-to-reach people, such as the homeless, vulnerable youngsters or elderly people. Together with five social organisations, we co-designed a tool which facilitates mobile outreaching and works on the motivation and retention of people when learning essential digital skills. The tool consists of two components that are complementary in use: a digital MobiDig app with a student and teacher’s interface, and a large animated LED “Hiveboard”.
By making use of mobile outreaching - the process where disadvantaged people are actively approached with offerings to learn - MobiDig aims at providing people with the opportunity to learn at their own pace and in the comfort of their own environment, all while being part of a community. Because for the most fragile, the threshold is often too high for them to go along to existing learning initiatives themselves. Outreaching inspires these audiences to feel free to learn. But going mobile has its challenges, so we thought through how our tool suits different forms of transportation, such as by being lightweight and offering handy protection for transporting workshop materials.
A hard-to-reach audience is most often a challenge to motivate and retain. To facilitate successful sessions, in MobiDig, we developed tools for gaining and retaining students' focus and enthusiasm while stimulating interaction and group spirit. With the MobiDig app students can learn and practise at their own pace. The Hiveboard is aesthetically appealing and helps visualise the individual or group progress. It can also be used for a quick quiz or evaluation, for defining the learning path and much more.
digital inclusion
mobile outreaching
motivation
retention
phygital
The MobiDig digital literacy tool, and more generally DigitAll, aims for social sustainability by working towards a society that is economically, socially and culturally healthy and resilient, with equal opportunities for all. We do this by improving access to a basic need: technology. Digital inclusion efforts can contribute to social sustainability by increasing access to technology and the internet and thus enabling individuals to participate fully in the digital world. This can enhance education, job opportunities, and social connections, leading to improved economic, social, and cultural well-being. In MobiDig, we did not intend to replicate existing learning tools but set out to make something that was inspired by the challenges encountered on the terrain with the most vulnerable audiences. Therefore, we partnered with five organisations that support those who need it: the homeless, newcomers, the elderly and youngsters. With this choice for a wide range of economic, cultural and age backgrounds, we ensured the wide applicability of the tool, so no one is excluded.
When the teachers of the social organisations reach out to these audiences, they take with them the MobiDig digital literacy tool (such as the HiveBoard) and other teaching materials. They typically also take with them a series of refurbished tablets or laptop computers, one for each student. These materials are donated through the DigitAll consortium, which also includes partners which collect, refurbish and distribute digital devices for social benefit. Also, the mobility of the tools and materials was carefully considered: we ensured that the digital literacy tool was compatible with sustainable modes of transport, such as bikes, carrier cycles and public transport. We used residual waste flow materials in the production of the MobiDig bag pack. The DigitAll consortium integrates, connects and strengthens a wide series of sustainability efforts, which we consider an exemplary approach.
With an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly design, the MobiDig digital literacy tool is intended to aid teachers in making technology literacy classes more accessible and appealing to a wider range of users, including those who may not have had prior experience with technology. We aimed to extend the aesthetics of the project not only to the visual qualities (User Interface, materials, shapes, LED animation, iconography) but also to the social dynamics and the overall experience that the tool enables.
To allow for the most optimal learning experience, we invested in a blended, “phygital” approach, consisting of an online platform and a physical LED board component called Hiveboard, supplemented with best-practice guidelines and inspirational materials for teachers. The online platform allows students to individually pace their progress through learning assignments, while the Hiveboard visualises the collective progress anonymously. Every assignment is represented by a hexagon consisting of 18 LEDs. A student who started a particular assignment is represented by a blue LED. A green LED stands for a student who finished the assignment, while a red LED notifies the group and the teacher that someone can use some help. This strategy stimulates personal empowerment and a learning pace everyone is comfortable with, while also harnessing opportunities for co-learning. For instance, a speedy student can help a slower student, thereby liberating the teacher in managing the class and increasing the sense of self-worth. A timer function adds a gentle sense of urgency, while the quiz function allows for creating collective, collaborative, playful learning. In our user tests, we observed how students’ engagement and participation increased, and a sense of community was fostered. Thereby, the MobiDig tool helps to overcome barriers to digital inclusion, such as lack of access, lack of digital literacy, and lack of motivation.
Inclusion lies at the core of the DigitAll consortium. Inclusion is both an objective (particularly digital inclusion), but also an organisational approach and tactic. A key tool for reaching out to a wide range of organisations is DigitAll’s Digital Inclusion Charter, which includes nine commitments to close the digital divide:
(1) identify and share best practices to improve digital inclusion;
(2) investigate what stands in the way of digital inclusion and work out appropriate joint actions;
(3) encourage those at the top of the organisation to engage with and help guide this commitment;
(4) improve digital inclusion in the organisation by encouraging internal training courses and sharing actions and progress;
(5) promote digital inclusion outside the organisation to increase the number of signatories to this charter and its impact;
(6) support campaigns that aim to make digital inclusion to broaden knowledge about the digital divide;
(7) introduce a procedure in the organisation to assess the extent to which digital inclusion is promoted among staff, customers and beneficiaries;
(8) set up actions to increase trust in digital tools, improve the sense of online security and arm users against possible abuse; and
(9) monitor the application of this charter and assess this with all signatories after three years so as to work out possible next steps.
The various governments in Belgium have signed the charter, together with 30 companies, and social organisations.
One of the joint actions (commitment 2) became the MobiDig project. There, specifically, we integrated inclusion thinking both in the process of the design trajectory (through the co-creation with five social organisations) and as the critical design objective for the development of the MobiDig digital literacy tool. We consider our focus on knowledge sharing, partnerships and collaborations exemplary for the roadmap towards more inclusion.
In the MobiDig initiative, citizens affected by digital exclusion were involved in various phases of the product development cycle, including the research phase, the co-creation phase, and the test phase. This involved conducting interviews and observations to understand their use of technology and integrate these insights into subsequent product developments.
Citizens benefited from the initiative by participating in workshops that taught media literacy, digital skills, and e-health applications. The workshops were attended by a few hundred people from various target groups, including pupils with minor learning disabilities, homeless individuals, elderly patients, people with social and financial difficulties, and staff at volunteer organisations.
The involvement of these citizens in the initiative had a positive impact, as it helped build trust and confidence between the facilitators and participants. The friendly and non-academic approach of the facilitators encouraged independence and collaboration among participants, and the Hiveboard tool was well received. The demand for continued workshops to provide follow-up support for digitally excluded people highlights the success of the MobiDig initiative.
Civil society was involved in the initiative by partnering with organisations that served the target groups, such as libraries, health clinics, social restaurants, and outreach programs. These partnerships helped to reach and serve a wider range of citizens who were affected by digital exclusion. The impact of this involvement was increased access to digital skills and resources for these citizens, which can help to bridge the digital divide and improve their quality of life.
MobiDig has been created by a working group of DigitAll composed of BNP Paribas Fortis, Proximus, CTG Circular and VRT (media). It has been co-created, tested and improved by five social organisations - Digidak, Hobo, Interface3.Namur, Le monde des possible and Link in the Kabel.
The Digital Inclusion Charter asks signatories to make a firm commitment towards taking action and creating awareness. The various governments in Belgium have signed the charter, along with 30 companies and social organisations. For a complete list of signees, see https://digitall.be/charter.
At the moment, MobiDig is still a local initiative in Belgium to start with. In the future, we hope that MobiDig can grow to a European level.
The DigitAll initiative brings together players from the business world, the social sector and federal and regional governments and administrations to build synergies and cooperate with one another. The participants are supported by various experts. They too belong to organisations with diverse backgrounds: the academic world, business world, social organisations, and federal and regional governments.
Similarly, the development team of MobiDig was highly multidisciplinary. Included were:
- Social organisations: teachers, coordinators, and indirectly: audiences through their participation and feedback
- Media makers (VRT lab)
- User-centred design experts
- Web/firmware programmers
- Interaction and product designers
- Digital participation experts
- Communication experts
- Project managers
The collaboration grew with bi-weekly meetings to gather all stakeholders, combined with more focused research, design and development sessions. This highly multidisciplinary process enabled a thoughtful user-centred-design trajectory to tackle the challenges encountered by the social organisations on the field, working with their audiences.
Many educational tools facilitate learning through providing learning material repositories and self-testing tools, sometimes infused with playful, narrative and gamified motivational triggers. They most often depart from the perspective of the individual student. Advanced educational platforms also take into account co-learning through providing communication and collaboration tools such as wiki’s, mapping boards, blogs, and others – but collaboration and group-thinking often stays limited in the online realm. However, many of these tools are very advanced, and not within the abilities of an audience who still has to attain digital skills in the first place. And moreover, an audience which is often not acquainted with learning and a class context.
Evidently, the social organisations we collaborate with give particular importance to the ease of use of the tool from a student perspective. But importantly, also to the group dynamics within the class context, which they identify as an important factor for both the motivation and retention of the students, who often come from fragile backgrounds and have a high drop-out rate. We therefore set out to develop a tool which is easy to use for digital novices and provides a tangible, playful, interactive element to create a shared understanding how the class collectively progressed towards the learning goals of the day. In other words, to “connect the class into a hive”. This unison between physical and digital components is labelled “phygital”, and is an emerging trend in marketing, Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities. However, the approach is little explored within the educational classroom context, which is where our MobiDig comes in. We considered the use of the MobiDig tool as versatile as possible, both as a combination of online platform and Hiveboard and the Hiveboard without the online platform for audiences which do not have the necessary skills yet to work with a smartphone.
The online platform is open source, and is offered by DigitAll as a service free of charge. An inspiration guide is shared as well.
The HiveBoard kit is aimed to be competitively priced. It includes, amongst others, an A2-sized LED board and a carrying bag, and transparent hexagons which fit on the LED board for fitting logo/icons on which represent particular class assignments. The logo’s can be flexibly added using removable, printable sticker sheets, and promote re-usability and sharing of the technologies between different organisations, schools, teachers,...
The HiveBoard kit and platform were designed with user-centred design methodologies, including semi-structured interviews, observations of the use contexts, co-creation sessions with the partners and evaluation sessions of the tool in use.
Digital exclusion is a global challenge. A problem entangled with many different factors, such as the access to technology (cost, resources, infrastructures) and educational factors among others. Locally, we address it through both creating new alliances (the DigitAll digital inclusion charter), partnerships with organisations which refurbish electronic equipment and the development of the MobiDig tool.
In November 2020, BNP Paribas Fortis, launched the Digital Inclusion Ecosystem, now called DigitAll. Since July 2021, Proximus has joined BNP Paribas Fortis as Partner in the ecosystem. At the moment, 30 companies signed the digital inclusion charter, as well as all Belgian governments.
In 2021, MobiDig was initiated in an exploratory phase with two social organisations and an educational partner to outline design objectives. Based on this work, in 2022 the team was expanded to three more social organisations, as well as Tree Company and Toyfoo for the design and development of the digital inclusion tool. In the spring of 2023, MobiDig will launch with a communication campaign.
