Project Summary

Context

Technology tools for disabled refer to devices or systems that support people with special needs to maintain or improve their autonomy, self-reliance and wellbeing. These tools address a wide range of special needs related to social, behavioural, cognitive, perceptive or physical conditions. As the focus of this project, "students with autism spectrum disorder" may suffer from difficulties with social communication and interaction, repetitive behaviours, delayed speech development, problems with eye-contact, reasoning, differentiating perceptions, and orientation that prevent them from performing their academic tasks in the same manner as other students. Technologies produced especially to ease social and communicative challenges of students with ASD play an important role in reducing barriers to learning. Obtaining knowledge about how to use these assistive technologies for students with ASD will provide SEN teaching undergraduates to improve both their teaching and technology skills. It will also enable them to facilitate learning processes of these students. In this respect, a curriculum is needed for SEN teaching undergraduates which will meet social and communicative needs of students with ASD and focus on the use and selection of the appropriate technology and when and how to utilise it and evaluate its efficiency. Need Analysis results that we conducted to frame this proposal, revealed the necessity of training courses on this issue. Hereby teaching materials consisting curriculum as modules and VR resources will be used during the course delivery.