Adult Skills and Community Learning

Course content

Our Getting Started course will give you the tools to plan your learning journey and develop digital skills. Whether they are needed for further study, getting back to, or moving on in work, or for everyday life.

You'll get a welcome induction to Adult Skills and an overview of what digital skills are. We'll show you how digital skills can be used in everyday life and make sure you know how to keep yourself safe online.

We'll teach you how to use Office 365, our interactive learning platform. You'll find out how and where to save and retrieve documents and we'll help you to create a secure password to protect your data.

You'll have time to ask questions and meet our tutors. You'll also complete an assessment to make sure you're on route to the most suitable program of learning to achieve your goals.

You'll leave the final session with details of the days and times of your course.

This course will enable you to:

Use digital skills safely and responsibly

  • Access our web-based learning platform (Teams for Education)
  • Change a password to a more secure one. Understand the benefits of multifactor authentication (MFA)
  • Understand our internet user policy and what could happen if this wasn’t followed

Use your digital skills to complete work related tasks

  • Understand cloud based storage and local storage
  • Create a shared folder and document
  • Access documents from Teams and save to your OneDrive
  • Complete a digital skills or Microsoft assessment. This is to make sure you're on the right learning pathway.

You'll also develop these core skills:

  • Work as part of a team, sharing ideas and motivating peers to complete a task
  • Have a positive attitude to plan your own work and complete it effectively within a timeframe
  • Be a good listener and follow instructions accurately
  • Be resilient and have the ability to stick with a task, even if things don’t go to plan, and learn from setbacks
  • Literacy and numeracy skills will be supported throughout the course

Course delivery 

Classroom based delivery with options for blended learning

  • GSDS: 4 x 3 hours sessions over two weeks, or 1 x 3 hour session over four weeks.
  • SUM365 2 x 3 hour sessions over one or two weeks.
  • PC's and access to tablet devices during delivery of the course are available. We encourage you to bring your own device to be able practice your digital skills though this is not essential.
  • Access to our learning platform - Teams for Education

What do you need?

  • A mobile phone – does not need credit, but must accept text messages. This will be used to verify your free Office 365 account
  • Folder, paper or notebook and pen
  • To attend all four sessions

Entry requirements

You'll have already completed the following with Adult Skills and Community Learning:

  • Information Advice and Guidance and an initial discussion around wanting to improve your digital skills, or
  • Dipping into Digital
  • Digital Drop in Session(s)
  • Developing Digital Skills

The level that you study will be determined by your initial assessment results. 

Course fees

This course is free to all learners over 19 years old.

How to apply

Progression

  • Functional Digital Skills for Work and Life
  • Digital Skills in the Workplace (Microsoft office skills) E3
  • Digital and IT Skills Level 1 / 2

What our learners say

  • Rather than giving us paper learning materials, everything was done on a computer which helped improve my digital skills
    Adult learner
  • I have just finished the getting started with digital skills course. It was very informative and the tutor was very patient.
    Adult learner