Digital skills checker

Use our new Digital Skills Checkers to understand your learner’s needs.

Digital skills programs have the greatest impact when shaped by learners’ needs and interests.

Good Things has an important tool to support digital mentors and organisations to better understand their learners’ needs and measure the impact of our digital skills programs:

The Digital Skills Checkers have been designed to assess your learners’ level of confidence in doing essential, everyday activities online and provide instant, actionable steps on how to improve.

We have worked with experts to design the two Checkers with Be Connected program learners and our network partners in mind. They support digital mentors and learners in setting learning goals and finding relevant information on digital skills to help them do more online.

How does it work?

People wanting to start improving their digital skills and confidence fill in the initial Digital Skills Checker – Getting Started. They answer a range of questions and the Checker generates a personalised report with recommended next steps they can follow to do more online.

Those results will be available to you in my.Goodthings portal. The same place where you can find your organisation’s unique URL to the checker.

After the learner has received support to improve their digital skills and confidence, they fill in the follow-up Digital Skills Checker – Your Progress. This will generate a new personalised report with recommended next steps so they can keep learning!

Find and use your Digital Skills Checker

Log in to our system and find your unique organisation link. This will allow you to track the results and measure the impact of your program.

Follow these steps:

  • Get your organisation’s special link (there are two links: one for the Pre survey and another for the Post participation survey)
  • Log in to my.goodthingsaustralia.org
  • Select ‘Manage Learners’
  • Choose the program ‘Digital Sisters AI for Good’

Check and follow this step-by-step video to learn how to find links to Digital Skills Checkers for the programs your organisation is taking part in with Good Things. You will also learn how to see results from the Checkers.

Video transcript

How to video: find and use Digital Skills Checkers

In this video: find Digital Skills Checker links for your program, see results from your Checkers

Find Digital Skills Checker links for your program

After logging in to my.goodthingsaustralia.org website, select manage learners

Every program has its own Digital Skills Checker. Select the program you need the Checker links for.

On the page that opens are special links to Digital Skills Checkers just for your organisation.

The Pre Survey Link is the Checker to use before you provide your support

The Post Survey Link is the Checker to use after you provide your support

Try turning these links into QR codes or shortened URLs to share with your learners

See your learner’s Digital Skills Checker responses

In the same screen, select view surveys

Select the hyperlinks to view results for each Checker or survey completed

Check the learner details to make sure you are looking at the right one

Results will only appear here if you use the special links to the Checkers for your organisation.

For next steps, see our videos how to register learners, record support given to a learner, acquit your grant.

Thanks for watching!

Pro tips and recommendations

To make it easier for your learners, get your unique URL and create a QR code they can scan. You can print a few QR codes to have them available for your learners during the digital skill session, or you can add them to your presentation. It is a good practice and will make this process easier.

Simply look online for a ‘QR Code Generator’ and follow the steps to create the QR code and download it. Make sure you are using a free platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

Click the headings below to read answers to questions about our new Digital Skills Checkers

Our Digital Skills Checkers are available to all our registered Network Partners, and they are completely free to use.

We have designed the Checkers for the Be Connected program, Digital Sisters, Building Digital Communities, Bridge program and more. All learners in mind. 

Organisations holding a any Good Things Grant have to use the Checker tools as part of their day-to-day support with learners.

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 results will be available in my.Good things portal under your organisation log-in. Organisations use this information to tailor their support to meet the person’s needs
  4. The person receives digital skills support from their mentor
  5. 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 the next steps for their learning journey.
  6. The results will be available in my.Good things portal under your organisation log-in. Organisations use these results to adapt their support to meet their community’s needs.
  7. Good Things reports on the results from thousands of people across the country to our Australian government funders to show the impact of our Digital Inclusion programs on a national scale.

Logging in to my.goodthingsaustralia.org website and select ‘manage grants’ and then ‘Manage learners’.

Every program has its own Digital Skills Checker. Select the program you want to see the results and select ‘view surveys’.

Select the hyperlinks to view the results for each Checker or survey completed

Check the learner details to make sure you are looking at the right one

We are required by our government funders to report on the impact of the our 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 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 instead. The rest of the personal details being entered need to be their own.

Good Things 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 practices 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.

The checker has been updated and reviewed during 2024 by our impact management team.