Creating a Digital Literacy Curriculum for Students in Morocco

Mani, Kavya; Du, Kaley; Bailey, Patrick; Reed, Ethan

Student Work

Creating a Digital Literacy Curriculum for Students in Morocco

Public Deposited

In Morocco, the percentage of the population that has access to the internet has risen from practically 0% in 2000 to almost 90% in 2021. Because of this rapid increase, a much larger portion of the population has become vulnerable to the internet’s inherent dangers due to a lack of widespread digital literacy education. Educall is an educational social enterprise that wants to create a digital literacy curriculum that could teach Moroccan students how to be safe online, which our team constructed and evaluated. We first determined the main internet threats plaguing Morocco by talking with parents and teachers, and we worked with Educall to design a curriculum to teach about each of these issues. Our resulting curriculum contains five modules: Misinformation, Personal Information, Social Media & Mental Health, Cyberbullying, and Malware. Each module was tested and evaluated using pilot programs, one with primary school students and the rest with high school students, the latter being done fully virtually. Each module was determined to be very successful in terms of student satisfaction, but although students believed they learned a lot, more testing and formal evaluation should be performed to determine the true educational content. Our major recommendations include instituting formal pre- and post-evaluations to determine the curriculum’s teaching effectiveness, as well as to provide more time for teaching every module. We hope that Educall will be able to use this curriculum to spread digital literacy education to students throughout Morocco.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator

Subject

Publisher