Senior Design Projects
ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2023
Microlearning Application to Support High Quality Autism Treatment
| ********** | |
| Name | Aubyn Stahmer |
| Affiliation | UC Davis Health MIND Institute |
Project's details
| Project title | Microlearning Application to Support High Quality Autism Treatment |
| Background | The rising number of children being identified as autistic has led to exponential growth in for-profit community agencies serving them and growing public health concerns regarding limited effectiveness data combined with the cost of services. We are in the process of developing training materials to support the use of state-of-the-art evidence-based early intervention for community providers. Currently, community agencies use a tiered system to provide autism treatment where trained therapists supervise technicians who provide hands on treatment. Technicians often have limited training and expertise prior to beginning their work with autistic children. |
| Description | We have proposed a study in which technicians will view just-in-time (JIT) microlearning modules: specific 5-10 minute lessons featuring a child of similar age, skill level and goals, prior to beginning a session. This will augment their training and confidence in using new evidence-based strategies and provide a relevant example immediately prior to their work with a child. Using JIT microlearning strategies has been shown to be effective in medical and education settings to teach complex strategies (Zhang & West, 2020; Javorcik & Polasek, 2019). The JIT modules provide learning content in manageable units that can fit technicians’ clinical schedules in a flexible manner. Each JIT module provides ideas for learning activities to teach a specific goal and brief information about how autistic children learn in the specific training context. We have gathered a library of example videos for a variety of children of different ages, skill levels, preferred materials and goals from prior projects. |
| Deliverable | Ability to build an app or web bases system accessible from a phone to filter and view videos |
| Skill set desirable | We would like to use these to construct JIT modules that will be accessible via a website, or preferably a phone-based app, by the clinician while they are out in the field. Ideally they could filter videos by the child’s age, current goals, teaching strategy used and preferred materials to find the most appropriate video for the current session. |
| Phone number | ********** |
| Client time availability | 30-60 min weekly or more |
| IP requirement | Client wishes to keep IP of the project |
| Attachment | N/A |
| Selected | No |
| Team members | N/A |
| TA | N/A |