Educational program for grandfather: how to improve the digital literacy of older people

What is wrong with courses for pensioners, what does the syndrome of learned helplessness have to do with it, how to involve the elderly in the digital world, says Sergey Grebennikov, Deputy Director of the RAEC

As people get older, they tend to be less able to navigate the digital environment and modern technologies. The lack of digital literacy among the older generation is a global problem that is on the agenda of organizations such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum. According to the results of the Digital Dictation for 2021 in our country, it is the 60+ audience that has the lowest level of digital consumption and ownership of digital resources. Pensioners, especially those who are not working, are least of all adapted to the digital environment, including in terms of financial behavior. So, in 2017, almost 30% of our countries over 60 did not use financial products at all – with the exception of a card for receiving a pension. Moreover, most of them pay for services through bank offices (80%) or branches of the Post to Our Country (more than half). Only 5% and 4% of pensioners, respectively, use mobile and Internet banking.

Lack of digital competencies makes older people easy targets for scammers. This problem became especially acute during the pandemic, when the number of cases of telephone and cybercrime in the country increased one and a half times.

But vulnerability to scammers is not the only way older people are harmed by poor digital literacy. Not knowing how to use digital products, pensioners have difficulty with such routine tasks as obtaining public services and paying utility bills, finding medicines, ordering groceries at home, calling a taxi, getting advice, setting tariffs or connecting TV channels. Fearful of e-commerce, older people prefer to shop offline – but due to health problems, many find it difficult to even walk to the nearest store.

ABC of the Internet for pensioners

The reasons for the lack of digital competencies in the elderly are quite obvious. The weakening of social ties, the end of a career, the state of health – all this reduces interest in learning something new. Lack of employment has a very noticeable effect on the digital regression, since it is usually associated with working at a computer. With retirement, the need to use even the simplest programs usually disappears, so the unemployed in our country are noticeably behind the employed in terms of digital literacy.

Among the reasons for the low digital literacy of pensioners, the lack of available information is often cited. Many state and public organizations are trying to solve this problem by launching educational and educational initiatives. So, since 2014, a joint project of Rostelecom and the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation “ABC of the Internet” has been operating in the cities of our country, the purpose of which is to teach pensioners and people with disabilities the basics of working with a computer and the Internet. The All-Russian Popular Front has a social campaign “Tell Grandma” to protect the elderly from fraud, and the Bank of our country conducts online financial literacy classes for older citizens. A lot of materials on improving digital literacy are collected on the Digital Dictation portal, an annual all-Russian campaign to test digital competencies, one of the organizers of which was RAEC.

In addition, social programs such as Moscow Longevity and Active Longevity indirectly help to improve digital skills, which include many remote events and lectures, for example, on choosing the right financial product.

Solutions are not for everyone

However, the proportion of older people who attend such programs is very small. So, in 2021, 43 thousand people completed training on the ABC of the Internet. Meanwhile, 42,6 million pensioners live in our country, which means that 0,1% of them signed up for the course! And even if we take the total number of graduates of the program for seven years, 400 thousand, this is still less than 1% of all pensioners in the country.

Of course, the role of these initiatives cannot be underestimated: the opportunity to acquire digital skills for free and in an accessible format is of great importance for older people. But, unfortunately, today these measures are extremely insufficient. The fact is that educational courses are designed primarily for active pensioners who themselves want to improve their competencies in the “figure”. Unfortunately, many older people do not have the desire to learn new technologies: they believe that it is too difficult for them or simply not necessary.

There is such a phenomenon as learned helplessness – a worldview when a person is convinced that he does not control his life, and all attempts to change something are doomed to failure. Often this condition is experienced by older people, and the lack of interest in digital education is just one of its manifestations.

Benefits of Responsibility

Paradoxically, sometimes the cause of learned helplessness can be overprotection from loved ones. If relatives, albeit with good intentions, take on all the worries of a pensioner, up to the most mundane ones: they buy food, solve household issues, organize leisure, a person loses the feeling of control over his life. And this can have extremely negative consequences.

This fact was confirmed by the famous 1976 experiment conducted by psychologists Ellen Langer and Judith Roden in a Connecticut nursing home. The researchers chose two groups of subjects – the inhabitants of the second and fourth floors. The inhabitants of the fourth floor were given the opportunity to make their own decisions about their lifestyle and daily routine: for example, choose a plant and take care of it, decide which movie to go to, communicate what they want to change in their room. The inhabitants of the second floor were kept in their usual way, surrounded by the care of the staff – in particular, it was emphasized that the responsibility for their well-being lies with the management, and they will not have to do anything.

Three weeks later, it turned out that the representatives of the group with increased responsibility are much more satisfied with their lives (according to the results of surveys of the subjects themselves). The same conclusions were confirmed by the medical staff of the nursing home. The effect persisted six months later, moreover, the mortality rate in the group on the fourth floor was two times lower than among the inhabitants of the second floor.

Happy digital life

The experiment showed that independent choice and responsibility for one’s decisions have a positive effect on the general condition of a person. This is especially important for older people, who, due to limited physical (and often financial) capabilities, narrow the zone of control over their lives. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to frustration and a reluctance to learn new things, let alone master digital products.

Meanwhile, it is digital literacy that gives pensioners more opportunities to manage their lives. For example, people with musculoskeletal disorders who find it difficult to go to the store can order products on their own through the application – and not reconcile with what relatives brought. On the Internet, older people can find suitable leisure options, choose films to watch, and look for interlocutors for online communication. This not only can make life more interesting and varied, but also has a positive effect on the general condition.

Subway advertising

Just organizing educational courses is not enough to make the audience want to attend them – you need to actively promote digital literacy and digital products. Moreover, it should be adapted for older people and placed in suitable sources for them. A good example is a public service advertisement in the Moscow metro, which, in the form of short cartoons, shows why no one should give the CVV of a bank card.

Often the authors of social advertising are mistaken with the choice of channels. So, recently a series of short videos with Leonid Agutin appeared on YouTube, dedicated to the basic rules of digital security. The idea itself is not bad: both in terms of content and in terms of choosing the face of the campaign, since Agutin is familiar to most of the older generation. But the videos themselves were posted on YouTube and social networks – on sites where pensioners do not make up a large share of the audience.

In general, digital is not the most suitable format for communication with older people: television, print media, outdoor advertising, leaflets “work” much better. So, in the series “Better Call Saul”, the main character, in order to advertise the services of a lawyer to residents of nursing homes, very accurately chose the time of the video showing – during the series “Murder, She Wrote”, which was popular among older Americans. Printed materials work well, such as digital safety flyers that vendors can hand out at smartphone stores or cell phone stores.

Grandma’s tablet

There is another problem with the use of digital products by older people. Retirees often suffer from visual, hearing, or musculoskeletal disabilities — and many sites and apps are not adapted to people with disabilities. According to the 2021 study, 19% of people with visual impairments, 5% with hearing impairments, and 5% with disorders of the musculoskeletal system noted that remote channels are completely or partially unsuitable for their needs.

To solve this problem, the Pensioners’ Party proposed to create applications, websites and software, taking into account the peculiarities of their perception by the older generation. In particular, these can be versions for the visually impaired and adaptation of sites for text-to-speech programs – the general rules of digital inclusiveness. The idea was also put forward to develop special technical products for our elderly countries – for example, a tablet computer with a large keyboard.

In addition to these measures, the development of digital products specifically for older people plays an important role. For example, VTB launched the service “Receiving a pension on a VTB card”, with the help of which pensioners can apply for the transfer of their pension from another bank in a few clicks without visiting the office. Tele2 has a campaign “There are no other people’s grandmothers”: those who wish can buy a smartphone with a large screen, pre-installed applications and a guide to the mobile Internet as a gift to the elderly. The Active Longevity program has developed the Social Services app for pensioners, through which you can sign up for project events and excursions, rent a rehabilitation device, call a social taxi or a nurse, find the nearest social service center or a volunteer.

Finally, we need to look for new methods of digital educational program for the elderly. So, in 2022, a long-term program on digital literacy will start in our country, within the framework of which it is planned to create new educational services for various groups of citizens, including pensioners. Perhaps this will become a new starting point for involving the older generation in digital life.