DISTANCE LEARNING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS OF ADULT LEARNERS

Abstract

The given study focuses on the specific of adult learning. The aim of our research is the following: with the help of a distant course to improve the level of media literacy, critical thinking and build psychological resilience to manipulative impact and the fraudulent attempts of social engineers. We demonstrated that despite the obstacles caused by the lack of face-to-face contact, online courses could be used as an alternative form of studying.   To our research we use the following methods: questionnaires, information collection, and statistical data processing. For the hypothesis verification, we use the following methods

 The course consists of four lessons and includes topics about information checking, developing critical thinking, and building psychological resilience to dishonest media content and resisting fraudulent actions of social engineers. We conducted a survey before and after the training, the results of which demonstrated that students significantly improved their levels of media and cyber literacy after attending online classes (21%). Our approach to an organization and holding an online study allowed us to keep participants interested and didn’t turn our lessons into boring lectures.

Thus, in the results, we succeeded to achieve the aim. Moreover, we saw, that distance learning can be an effective tool for adult learning if we take into consideration the specific features of an online format. The example of the given training showed that, if necessary, online learning can be employed as an alternative and quite an effective tool for providing knowledge and skills. 

Keywords: information literacy, adults, psychological resilience, distance learning

Accepted: 26.09.2021

Reviewed: 11.10.2021

Published: 18.10.2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31108/3.2021.5.2.1