Module 1. Access & Inclusion

The module “Access and inclusion” is fundamental to enabling learners’ online voice. More than this, it is crucial to teach learners how to enable other people’s voices so that the overall digital world becomes a more open and accessible environment with numerous positive spillovers into the physical world. This world has its very own rules that must be understood so that access and inclusion can be afforded to all undisturbed.

The Digital Citizenship Educational Handbook of the Council of Europe defines Access and inclusion as: “… access to the digital environment and includes a range of competences that relate not only to overcoming different forms of digital exclusion but also to the skills needed by future citizens to participate in digital spaces that are open to every kind of minority and diversity of opinion.”

As such, the course will impart to participants those necessary skills to fulfil this competence. It will teach learners how to guide themselves and others into more open attitudes and inclusive behaviours to embrace the diversity inherent in the online community and resolve conflicts by expressing oneself in more productive ways while guarding against unproductive divisive attitudes. The skills acquired will thus then translate well into the physical world and their everyday lives.

As such, Access and Incursion are combined together into one notion of openness. Democracy and acceptance go hand in hand. Anything that would bar Access and Inclusion in all its forms would become an unbearable constraint on Democracy and its humanitarian values such as that of openness and dialogue in the physical plane and vice versa. As such the range of topics to be developed are broad and include:

• What is Access?
• What is Inclusion?
• Why is Access and Inclusion Important
• How our mind works
• How to combat prejudice
• How democracy works
• How the digital makes democracy better
• Unacceptable behaviours, From Bullying to Fake News
• What you should know about the dangers of the Digital world
• How to stay safe and protect others

The importance of the topic should not be underestimated. The skills acquired here can well be used in the broader spectrum of life. The overall aim, beyond topic-specific knowledge and competencies acquired, is to use these to overcome prejudices, inherent in our society by being given the tools to understand them, their impact and how to alter patterns of thought as well as behaviors in ourselves and others. This will turn come to effect positive change that may help overcome those differences that may at times lead to the physical and digital divide.