Given that this field of study is relatively untouched, it was decided that a qualitative methodology would be most appropriate. The goal was to provide a rich and holistic description of the learning experience, an overall view of what happens and how ]earners feel and react. Intent on listening to the learners in their own voices, we modeled the specific design after a heuristic approach. Although the time spent with learners was limited (8 to 10 weeks), we believed that a heuristic inquiry would be most suitable in encouraging learners to divulge the experience they were going through as they were living it. In the end, 46 learners from the first four levels of literacy completed a minimum of 24 hours of online activities and participated in a series of seven interviews. These learners, all aged between 18 and 35, were divided more or less equally among six community literacy centres. Three of the centres focused on English as a first language, while the three others focused on French as a first language. Findings Learners reported benefiting in many ways. These acquisitions are grouped into four categories: cognitive, computer/telematics, metacognitive/knowledge transfer, and socio-cognitive. In terms of cognitive skills, learners noted many of the components involved in the mechanics of literacy: spelling, punctuation, verbs, pronouns, writing sentences, reading, etc. A few of the level 3 and 4 learners also noted a greater ability in more advanced skills such as revision, spell checking and editing. In terms of computer/ telematics, learners reported a variety of new skills such as the ability to start and exit both a computer and a web-based environment, an increase in typing speed, comfort at navigating a web-site and even general maintenance of 0 computers and Web pages (such as how to unfreeze a Web page). In terms of metacognitive skills, learners spoke of an awareness on how skills learned in AlphaRoute could be applied in other situations, whether in life as whole, in a training program or at work. Finally, in terms of sociocognitive skills, learners remarked how they could sometimes support each other or work with each other. They noticed that they could benefit from skills others had acquired, whether these related to a specific content (i.e. spelling a given word) or to computer skills (i.e. printing a document from a web-site). More details on learning results appear in Chapter 3 of the report. Overall, learners exhibited a variety of independent behaviours. In the data, we see four main types of independent acts: the ability to navigate (functional independence), feeling good about learning (emotional independence), developing means to learn (cognitive independence), getting results and transferring learning results to other situations (meta-cognitive independence).
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