Designers for Learning currently has five teams of advanced instructional design students completing open educational resources for adults working to improve their literacy and other vital skills. One of the hardest aspects of their design challenge is becoming familiar with the needs, the learners, and the adult basic skills educational context.
ProLiteracy, the largest adult literacy and basic education membership organization in the nation, offers many resources to help our service-learners better understand these topics, including their recent Annual Statistical Report for 2017-18. The report compiles the results of the annual survey of their member programs into a visual representation of the survey’s findings.
Take a moment to skim the report’s exhibits below. Note that 65% of ProLiteracy members operate with an annual budget of $150,000 or less and only 36% receive federal and/or state funding. 34% of the students are unemployed. Only 38% of programs have paid instructors.
These statistics are part of the reason why we consider the work of our students as service-learning. Through their experience in our program, we hope to enlighten these designers to this grossly underserved educational need. While numbers and statistics can only tell part of the story, the data compiled by ProLiteracy helps to spark the conversation.
