ASDigital – Distance learning training for secondary education teachers: using visual thinking as a method to teach digital skills to students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
The COVID-19 pandemic led to schools worldwide closing down, affecting 1.2 billion children in 186 countries. This changed education by making it more digital, with teachers adapting to online teaching. Many teachers, who had never done this before and lacked proper training, struggled with the shift.
Research shows that online learning can be effective and efficient (Zeglen & Rosendale, 2018). However, there’s a problem: only 20% of European countries offer distance education training to teachers. Our project aims to address this need (European Commission, 2017).
Digital skills are essential in today’s world, with most jobs requiring some level of digital proficiency. However, few countries include digital skills in their school curricula.
Additionally, 80 million Europeans face digital exclusion due to factors like low income, education, location, culture, or disabilities like autism, which affects around 7 million people and is growing rapidly (European Commission, 2017).
Our project seeks to address these challenges and promote digital skills and inclusion in education.
Therefore, in an attempt to minimise the digital exclusion of students with autism while at the same time, contribute to the professional development of secondary-school teachers, so that they are well-equipped to cope with the sudden shift in education due to the COVID breakout, ASDigital aims to:
- Develop an e-course with educational materials, a serious game, and visual thinking video tutorials (specially designed for students with ASD) to train them on the basic digital skills they are going to need when they graduate from school;
- To deliver a training course to directly train secondary-school teachers on online learning, a skill necessary for their professional development.