Doctor's appointments, hairdresser appointments, ticket purchases and banking transactions are increasingly being shifted to online platforms. Information concerning the children's school or even the workplace is announced by e-mail or on the corresponding homepage. The basic ability to use digital media is just as much a prerequisite as their permanent expansion.

There are 6.2 million people living in Germany who are classified as low-literate (Buddeberg & Grotlüschen, 2020). These people are at risk of being excluded from society because they do not have sufficient digital skills (Buddeberg & Grotlüschen 2020; Koppel & Langer, 2020).

A recent study on literacy in Germany highlights that low literacy skills predominantly affect the use of work-related technologies. Individuals with low literacy exhibit a lower frequency of computer usage and email composition in comparison to the general population. On the other hand, insignificant differences are observed in the utilization of smartphones, tablets, and short message sending. These individuals, however, demonstrate a higher frequency of voice message sending, video calling, and social network usage compared to the general population (Grotlüschen et al., 2019, p. 31).

Some of these low-literate people attend basic education courses in which they acquire digital skills in addition to reading and writing. In this way, course instructors in basic education courses support participants on the path to digital inclusion, helping them to learn to swim in the digital ocean. For this to succeed, course instructors should take the learners' individual preconditions into account. The limited digital equipment of the participants (Buddeberg & Grotlüschen, 2020; Boeren et al. 2020; Evers, 2020), as well as their heterogeneous learning abilities and limited digital skills (Koppel & Langer, 2020; Evers, 2020), should be taken into account when designing courses. If these individual prerequisites are taken into account, digital course content that is suitable for learners and can be mastered can be offered and supplemented by appropriate support measures. The teachers' own digital skills should also be taken into account (Rohs, Schmidt-Hertha, Rott & Bolten, 2019). Last but not least, the framework provided by the educational institution should also be taken into account in the teaching concept. Thus, teachers play a key role, as they are responsible for the conception and design of lessons (Strauch & Radtke, 2010).

The question for the presentation is:

How can successful instructional designs in basic education courses with the inclusion of digital media be developed by course instructors?

In order to answer this question, the presentation will first provide theoretical perspectives, including the aforementioned prerequisites on the part of the learners, the course instructors themselves, and the educational institutions. These will be combined with the research results from the GediG project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and will converge in a model of "Swimming in the Digital Ocean". The symbol of the ocean is transferred out of the European Reference Framework for Digital Competences DigComp2.1, in which learning to swim in the digital ocean is used as a metaphor (Carretero, Vuorikari & Punie, 2017, p 14-15). Finally, recommendations for action are compiled for the design of individualized course concepts for basic education integrating digital media.

The aim of the presentation is to show how course instructors in basic education courses can profitably incorporate digital media into the course design by taking into account individual prerequisites on the part of the participants, the framework set by the educational institution, but also their own individual competencies. Within the scope of the "GediG" project, data was collected using a mixed-method approach. The qualitative as well as quantitative surveys, which were carried out all over Germany, focused on participants, instructors, conceptual workers and managers of educational institutions in the field of basic education. The complexity of the phenomena to be investigated was to be taken into account via the chosen approaches and it was to be made possible to analyze the different perspectives more comprehensively in order to elaborate multi-perspective results (Johnson & Christensen, 2019). For the consideration of the three actors (course participants, course instructors, and educational institutions), the presentation refers to quantitative data collection using an online questionnaire on experiences, attitudes, and frameworks regarding the use of digital media. The online questionnaires for course instructors (N=49), conceptually active staff and managers (for the perspective of the educational institutions) (N=58) were closely coordinated in terms of content, but they differed in the type of perspective on the phenomena studied. Since leaders of educational institutions and conceptually active staff for the focused survey areas partly hold cross-role functions, they were combined into one group of people. The latent constructs contained in the questionnaires were subjected to an exploratory factor analysis (Brandt, 2020) and a confirmatory factor analysis (Gäde, Schermelleh-Engel & Brandt, 2020). For quality assurance, the questionnaires were tested for reliability and validity (Moosbrugger & Kelava 2020). Quantitative data on participants in basic education courses were collected via a questionnaire (N=74), which was designed specifically for this target group via the use of easier-to-understand language, a font suitable for the target group, supplementary video material for better comprehensibility of data collection and privacy, as well as icons and voice output. The data basis for the analysis of the quality criteria resulted from pretests with students of the Weingarten University of Education; the questionnaire for participants was also subjected to communicative feedback. The data obtained from the online questionnaire survey were analyzed descriptively and inferentially with SPSS and AMOS, correspondingly. Data collection took place in 2021 and 2022.

From the empirical data collected in the GediG project, conclusions could be drawn for the first time as to which factors are essential in the design of courses in order to do the target group of low-literacy learners justice. The focus was on the successful use of digital media in basic education. From the empirical references to individual components from the theory, an overview model was derived, which shows what course instructors must consider in order to design an appropriate course. In combination with the empirical data, conclusions for the practice of basic education were derived. The "Swimming in the Digital Ocean" model embeds what course instructors should consider when designing courses individually with the use of digital media. In particular, these are: Prerequisites of the stakeholders: - General institutional framework - Access requirements of course participants to digital devices - Individual prerequisites on the part of the participants with regard to digital competencies - own media pedagogical competences Preparation of the digital (supported) learning environment: - Integration of a rich offer of digital media into the lessons - Learner-friendly and manageable tasks - Supporting course participants Preparing for the leap into the digital ocean and learning to swim in it is the task of the course instructors, who should support the course participants under the above-mentioned conditions. An individual approach to designing courses turns out to be beneficial in this regard, and good-practice examples will be shown in the presentation.

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