Digital skills checker

Anyone can choose to use our Digital Skills Checkers! They are both free and available online.

We have designed the Checkers with Be Connected program learners in mind, but it is available for your staff and volunteers to have a go at as well.

Organisations holding a Building Digital Skills grant from our Be Connected program will use the Checker tools as part of their day-to-day support with learners.

All Building Digital Skills grant holders are required to incorporate the two Digital Skills Checkers into their programs as part of their grant T&Cs. At least 50% of their learners must complete both the Getting Started Checker and the Your Progress Checker. Our support resources have been designed to help you to do this. Please carefully read grant T&Cs for more details.

Make sure to count the time it takes to help people fill in the two Checkers when registering your learners in our systems, so that these activities count towards your grant targets. Log in to my.GoodThings to get started.

Digital mentors working in the community can use the Checkers at two points in a learner’s journey.

The ‘Getting Started’ skills checker gets completed before you start your support with someone, so you know where you are starting from.

The ‘Your Progress’ skills checker gets completed after your support has been provided to see how much their skills and confidence has improved. For many digital skills programs this will be two-three months later, but you can tailor this timing to suit your program.

Depending on the person’s digital skills and confidence, and the level of support they need to fill it in, the digital skills checker tools can take between 5 and 30 minutes to complete.

1. A person is supported to fill in the ‘Digital Skills Checker – Getting Started’. They answer a range of questions and fill in their details to receive a personalised report.
2. The Checker uses their answers to show how confident they are in doing everyday tasks online and highlight next steps for their learning journey on screen. It can also be emailed to them.
3. The person shares their results with their digital mentor by showing them on screen or emailing them their report.
4. The digital mentor uses this information to tailor their support to meet the person’s needs
5. The person receives digital skills support from their mentor
6. The person fills in ‘Digital Skills Checker – Your Progress’. They fill in a range of questions and fill in their details to get a personalised report with next steps for their learning journey.
7. The person shares their results with their digital mentor by showing them on screen or emailing them their report.
8. The digital mentor uses these results to adapt their support to meet their community’s needs.
9. Good Things Foundation reports on the results from thousands of people across the country to our Australian government funders to show the impact of the Be Connected program on a national scale.

Good Things Foundation Australia developed the questions with the experts at Swinburne University who worked on the Be Connected Evaluation and Australian Digital Inclusion Index. It is based on international best practice for assessing digital skills. We then tested the questions with community organisations in our network and their learners, to make the wording and tool as user friendly as possible.

When a person has completed the survey, they are asked to submit some personal details to see their results. The results will then display on screen, and the person will receive a link to them by email. You can ask the person completing the survey to share their results with you, so you can tailor your support accordingly and see your own impact. If you using the Checkers as part of your grant, you will also soon be able to use my.GoodThings to send your Checkers and see results.

We are required by our government funders to report on the impact of the Be Connected program at a national level. The two Checkers help us to do this. We need the personal details being collected for the personalised report to be generated and to report to our government funders on the number of individuals benefiting from the program. We have kept the details being collected to the minimum possible while fulfilling our obligations and take privacy very seriously.

Question responses will be stored by Good Things Foundation in line with our privacy policy. We will de-identify information collected in the Checker form when using it for service reporting and improvement purposes required by our Australian Government funders.

Learners can decide whether they would like to submit their personal details at the end after they have had a chance to view all the questions. If they do not enter their details, they will not be able to see the personalised report. They can choose to show a copy of their results to the person they are working with to improve their digital skills.

Some people completing the survey may not have an email address. If that is the case, they can use the email address of the digital mentor they wish to share their results with instead. The rest of the personal details being entered need to be their own.