July 2025
At VHS Hannover, we are only a few step away from making our DigComp level classifications for our courses public. However, now there are growing concerns.
Here is the background: Our plan so far was that we would make the digital competence levels associated to our variuos courses (in ideally any possible subject) transparent to everybody, especially our customers. Ways to do this are two: a) in form of text, part of the course description b) possibly with icons / badges, to indicate the levels associated to the course also visually.
What is the problem? There are growing concerns that mentioning the topic of digital compentence might even deter customers. We have a lot of participants in our courses who attend courses not solely for learning something but also for socialising. Some of them are elderly people. Volkshochschule is not only an educational institution for them but also a social place. Or they indeed come in order to learn something concretely (e.g. a foreign language), but they are not familiar with digital devices (computers, smartphones etc.), and they are also not interested in getting used to them. If such people read a course description and see "digital compentences" mentioned, they may feel disinvited just by the fact that the topic is mentioned. They also would not take the effoert to read the explanation of what are digital compentences, and why they are important, and that a given course possibly may require no digital competences at all.
For such customers, mentioning "digital competences" may be a marketing blunder, some colleagues say.
What would be the alternative? What could we do when we skip the idea of communicating DigComp levels (of courses) in our public announcements? The answer is: we would still use DigComp in our internal processes of planning and providing courses. But we would keep this internal, withoug making it transparent to the public.
What will be the final decision? We do not know yet.
Currently we are testing our procedure to "tag" courses for their DigComp levels, as a workflow between planning pedagogues and the teachers going to teach the classes.
