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. When the pandemic stopped the in-person tour on March 13, 2020, the team moved online. Within a few weeks it went from 2 pre-recorded workshops to about 30 live workshops a week.

What came of it

By early 2022, the project had recorded 11,500 participations in more than 1,300 basic digital literacy workshops across Québec and francophone Canada, on a $3M budget. That was about a third of all participants in the federal program, with about a tenth of its funding.

The work ran in three streams:

Public workshops

~10,300 people reached in 1,300+ workshops, delivered by the project team and contracted facilitators

Professional training

1,000 library and community professionals trained in 130 sessions

Events

~1,600 participants at 24 events