DigiMENTE: media education for Latin America

Despite the fact that media and digital skills are necessary to  civic action, citizenship and participation in social and political causes (Darzabi, 2020),  most education systems in LATAM lack resources and curricular guidelines to boost media literacy across the educational system, and thus this issue is described by some as a “demand, without offer” (Centro LATAM Digital 2020). Associated with this we find that the LATAM region ranks lowest in the world in tech skills and skills related to communication (GSI, 2020), and 81% of LATAM youth are having difficulty finding a job partly due to this lack of skills (Manpower, 2020). 

Therefore, it is no surprise that 70% of the population in different countries of LATAM don’t know how to detect fake news; with 73% in Colombia, and 66% in Mexico and Argentina (Kaspersky, 2020).

To better understand the problem, we conducted surveys and focus groups on students from vulnerable contexts, as well as interviews with educational authorities of those three countries and we discovered that the subjects or initiatives aimed at developing media and digital literacy skills in the national secondary or high school education systems are almost nonexistent.

Bringing the curriculum to an extended number of schools across Latin America and the Caribbean and, in future stages, to other regions, will provide the youth with the media skills they require to succeed in their professional lives and have access to better living conditions.

DigiMENTE is a curriculum created to train young Latin Americans (12 to 17 years old), in 16 to 32 hours, on the skills needed to participate and interact in a responsible and ethical way in the media ecosystem under any academic, professional and personal context. 

After developing the curriculum and testing it with our target audience, we are now looking to reach thousand of students and teachers to boost their abilities in 4 scopes:

1. Assessment, understanding and analysis of information, news and content produced by the media.

2. Creation and production of content with, for and in the media.

3. Participation and performance in and with the media.

4. Ethical and critical reflection on the information that is produced, consumed and shared.

DigiMENTE is easy to use and is delivered through an E-Learning platform that enables teachers, students and young people to achieve media learning in a flexible and independent way. As Internet connection and access is scarce and unreliable in many regions of Latin America, DigiMENTE can also be applied offline, downloading or printing a series of guides and activities in PDF format. This helps the curriculum to stay flexible and accessible for everyone, regardless of the infrastructure at their disposal.

Additionally, DigiMENTE has a team of trainers, who offer free online and offline workshops for teachers, influencers and journalists, to strengthen their media literacy and apply these learnings in their jobs. The team generates partnerships with schools, colleges and public education systems and adapts the DigiMENTE content to the specific needs of the institutions. Based of this adaptation the training sessions are imparted, providing support and assistance to teachers during and after trainings.

Our target audience is Spanish-speaking people between 12 and 17 years of Latin-American countries, mainly living in vulnerable communities. They have been underserved because there isn't an institutionalized  program of media literacy in secondary or high school that is being successfully implemented where they can develop the digital and media literacy skills necessary that the current and future civic and global challenges require. 

To understand the media education needs of our audience, we conducted a survey with a sample of students with the same profile, as well as 4 focus groups. At the same time, we reviewed study plans and conducted interviews with different educational systems at the local and national level from which we confirmed that young students have a digital and media literacy gap that educational systems are not covering. Based on this context research, we developed a curriculum that helps them evaluate critically and ethically the content they consume; participate actively in their communities; protect their digital sensitive data; know their digital rights; and develop creative content in a responsible way. We tested the curriculum among ±500 and then piloted the second version among ±1,700 students in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina and the results showed a significant improvement in the student’s digital and media skills. After this we have been scaling and replicating the program in multiple countries, reaching more than 7.000 teachers, and subsequently around 200.000 students.

Digimente helps students to evaluate the content they consume critically and ethically; participate actively in their communities; protect their digital sensitive data; know their digital rights; and develop creative content in a responsible way. In addition, we teach professors and facilitators innovative ways to perform in their classes; improve their skills in the analysis of digital media; and provide them with resources to support the teaching of subjects such as language, social sciences, computing and civic education among others.

The understanding and replication of the program is simple for the students because it includes resources that engage them in a fun and entertaining way, considering not only the Spanish language but the culture of the Latin American, based on the findings of the focus groups and the testing stages of the curriculum.

The program recently launched it’s e-learning platform, an innovative tool that enables anyone with Internet access and a computer or smartphone to take the DigiMENTE course and get certified in media literacy by the program.

DigiMENTE is a program created from and for Latin America. Movilizatorio, the leading organization behind the program, is a Colombian organization with offices in Colombia and México. All team members in DigiMENTE are latinx, and most have vast experience working with educators, young people and entrepreneurs in their countries. 

Juliana Uribe, CEO and founder of Movilizatorio, is a Colombian woman who lives at the intersection of social and educational innovation and the digital age. She is passionate about creating civic engagement, and participation and sees education as a central tool to achieve this. Her work has strengthened  educational innovation in the region, implementing diverse initiatives to tackle gaps in educational quality. Juliana has a strategic view that includes both learning, citizen mobilization and political incidence to achieve a more equal and sustainable region.

As Deputy Director at Movilizatorio, Francisco Gonzalez has worked with and coordinated DigiMENTE since its beginning in 2020, reaching  +200,000 students. He has led other digital education projects, where, for example, he managed to get part of Movilizatorio's educational content included in the national remote education program in Mexico during the pandemic.

Having a team that is latinx, and is from different countries and contexts, has helped DigiMENTE to connect with diverse institutions and communities that are close to the team's work. The strong focus on participation and collaboration that is intrinsic to DigiMENTE’s concept, since we have been betting on focus groups, interviews and dialogue spaces from the beginning, enables us to involve students and teachers in the development of the curriculum, as well as its implementation in schools.

As DigiMENTE is part of Movilizatorio, Solve would not only benefit the DigiMENTE team directly, but would be of great value to all departments of the organization. The DigiMENTE project is currently seeking to develop key technical knowledge that enables the team to strengthen the performance of the e-learning platform, which includes UX/UI design, webpage development and the platform’s monitoring and evaluation.

Additionally, we seek to solidify the team’s abilities in pitch development, storytelling and digital marketing to improve the reach and raise funds to enhance the impact of our program regionally and internationally. Movilizatorio as a whole will benefit form the Solve, in various aspects: the organization's leaders who focus on strengthening their management and strategic vision, technical teams, who would benefit from educational sessions on field work, monitoring and evaluation, as well as communication specialists who seek to increase their abilities in marketing, digital communications and brand identity development. The DigiMENTE team, as well as teams from other technology based programs, would greatly benefit from technology education, including programming and UX/UI design. Monetary support would benefit the program to enhance the learning experience of DigiMENTE, creating updated content iteratively and making improvements on the e-learning platform, and supporting the costing of staff members.

DigiMENTE is a media literacy curriculum designed specially for young people in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries that also allows access to those from more vulnerable backgrounds and segregated communities. 

Unlike other similar curriculums, DigiMENTE is particularly innovative because:

• It was designed based on the results of focus groups, surveys and pilot tests executed with students from Colombia, Argentina and Mexico, to adapt to the needs of the Latin American region. This allows us to serve a broad target audience: Spanish-speaking youth from 12 to 17 years of age from any context and socioeconomic level.

• In addition to covering skills for the evaluation of information, it also considers skills for the creation and production of content with, for and in the media; participation and acting skills with and in the media; and skills for ethical and critical reflection on the information that is produced, consumed and shared, thus boosting civic participation and action.

• It is a simple support asset for teachers since the topics and activities are flexible, and can be adapted to curricular subjects of secondary and highschool education such as social sciences, Spanish, ethics and computer science, among others.

• It can be learnt virtually and remotely, adapting to the context of the students and without the need of a permanent internet connection, using an interactive and fun e-learning platform.

• It has written and audiovisual materials that serve as reinforcement so that its use is more dynamic.

We believe that education has the power to boost civic action and engagement in people of all ages. For this we are targeting educational systems that can reach many people in diverse contexts and that have a great influence on the learning and abilities of citizens and future citizens. Our impact goals for the next year can be divided into key actors:

Students:

• Increment their capabilities to evaluate, in a critical and ethical way, the information they consume on the internet.

• Improve their skills to create their own content and be key actors in the media ecosystem of the XXI Century.

• Participate in a more proactive way with their digital communities, engaging in cultural, social, environmental and political activities.  

• Learn how to protect and defend their digital rights.

• Understand the risks of their interactions in the media ecosystem.

For teachers:

• Improve the performance of teaching in face-to-face and remote classes.

• Increment of the educational tools and resources for use in language, informatics, ethics, and social sciences subjects.

• Boost their skills to identify misinformation and evaluate online information in a more critical and ethical way. Increase their interaction with the digital media.

• Increase their drive to motivate students to take on civic and social activities, both in class and outside of school.

In the next 5 years we expect to be present in 60% of the Latin American countries, reaching over 1 million students, teachers and young people, both with our E-learning platform and synchronous workshops. We will also start to expand to informal spaces, such as community based initiatives, social media and virtual learning communities, to offer a wider range of learning formats of media and digital education. DigiMENTE seeks to be an example on the power of media education and digital learning, to achieve a stronger social tissue and a more engaged and active citizenship.

DigiMENTE uses several strategies and indicators to measure the progress towards our goals. Among them we measure our reach by examining:

• The number of schools, colleges, universities and other organizations that are implementing the curriculum with their students.

• The number of students who are receiving the full version of the curriculum or part of the contents adapted as complementary materials to their curricular subjects.

• Number of people that access the DigiMENTE platform.

• Number of people that download the free contents from the DigiMENTE platform.

• Number of views of our free educational videos.

Furthermore we measure the impact of our content and actions on media learning of students and teachers:

• Percentage in the  increase of the digital skills developed by the students upon completion of the curriculum.

• Results of the curriculum’s impact evaluation with a sample of students, where they were evaluated prior to receiving the DigiMENTE content and subsequently. We had a control and an experimental group of students. The control group showed no increase; the experimental group increase was up to 42%.

• Results of virtual post-evaluation surveys with casuistic and conceptual questions; the average score is 8/10.

• Results of teacher surveys where we seek to find out if the curriculum is useful and 97% agree that DigiMENTE is useful for them and their students’ development.

As the Internet becomes increasingly present in our societies, more possibilities of civic engagement and participation in media are available to citizens. However, these spaces also increase the likelihood of violence, disinformation and hate speech that detriment democracies and societies. This is accompanied by young people that increasingly feel unprepared or unable to participate in civic spaces (OECD 2020). DigiMENTE uses a tested currículum to strengthen the media literacy skills of teachers and students, through a flexible e-learning platform, onsite and online training workshops and downloadable educational resources, which are applied by teachers in diverse subjects. The short intermediate outputs of these activities include a teaching force that has better abilities and resources to instruct students on media education, better teacher performance in onsite and virtual classes and increased media abilities of students and teachers, such as: critical analysis of information, creative production of content, stronger collaboration skills and more ethical and responsible thinking. In the long term, better media literacy in schools, provides all students with the necessary skills to participate in local, regional and global democratic processes, assess the veracity of information, be aware of their own agency and mobilize to solve their communities problems.

DigiMENTE is powered by a digital platform that includes both downloadable guides and resources (for low Internet contexts) and an interactive and easy to use e-learning platform. Everything is centralized at (www.digimente.org) with the aim that anyone, whether they are teachers, students, researchers or academics, can access the curriculum for free and learn about media literacy without the need of a permanent internet connection.

The platform also keeps track of the number of teachers and students who enter and download the materials. All the content has been adapted to different multimedia formats such as videos, podcasts and other resources like infographics, templates and readings, as well as the average grades of the e-learnings activities.

Furthermore, the teachers who apply the study plan provide guidance to their students through easily accessible platforms such as Google Meets, Zoom and WhatsApp. 

We believe in the power of diversity and inclusion, our organization team is led mostly by latinas, with 70% of directive roles occupied by women. We also strive for diversity and inclusion, and currently our team has 2 persons with disability, 3 victims of the colombian armed conflict, 9 people belonging to the LGBTIQ+ community, 5 nationalities and 30 women. We support and empower all the people in Movilizatorio, no matter religion, gender, sexual preferences, or ethnicity. All the people in our very diverse team are valued for their talent, courage and knowledge dedicated to each project.

DigiMENTE is a curriculum that was and will always be a solution governed by inclusion and equity: from the beginning we’ve always kept in mind that it should be developed in a way that it is adaptable enough to reach a wide range of contexts every Latin American country has: from private education institutions to public institutions with limited resources, remote access and from segregated areas of our countries