AlphaNumérique: digital literacy at provincial scale

The problem

Across Québec, public libraries and community organizations were fielding the same needs: seniors trying to avoid online scams, newcomers navigating digital government services, adults who never got a proper introduction to the basics. No single team could deliver that training everywhere it was needed, in every region, in the right way for each community.

The approach

AlphaNumérique was a four-year, Québec-wide digital literacy project, co-led by Techno Culture Club and Bibliopresto.ca in partnership with the province’s major library networks. I worked on getting it funded starting in 2017, as co-director of Techno Culture Club, and directed the program in 2020–2021. Out of more than 150 applications to the federal funding program, 36 projects were chosen; AlphaNumérique was one of them.

The idea was to equip partner organizations — over 50 public libraries, community groups, and CEGEPs — to deliver digital literacy training themselves, adapted to their own communities. Workshop topics were first chosen from a survey of Québec’s major library networks; later topics came from workshop facilitators, community partners, and participants themselves. Having that range of inputs feeding the project, and the budget to keep developing new content, made the work genuinely collaborative.

Not everything went as planned. The original design had library personnel playing a key facilitation role, and between funding delays, the pandemic, and some organizational resistance to change, that had to be rethought. It became an opportunity to find other ways of inviting library staff in: clearer messaging, testimonials, print-ready workshop catalogues, and a variety of live online events that let people build confidence gradually.

What came of it

Over the course of the project we trained more than 12,000 participants across Québec and francophone Canada in basic digital literacy skills, on a $3M budget — about a third of all participants reached through the federal program, with about a tenth of its funding.