Tech for Inclusivity and Equity
In this article, I reflect on my MakerED assignment, where I had to come up with a prototype that could potentially support the attainment of any of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). I decided to work with SDG 4 which deals with providing quality education because I have a personal interest in EdTech. More specifically, my group and I decided to go for children with special education needs and develop prototypes that could address their various needs.
Edtech has the potential to improve learning outcomes for students and solve pertinent challenges in education provided it is built on the existing ecosystem, is built with the user and is flexible.
As an aspiring innovator who is passionate about technology and Edtech, it is often easy to get carried away by your “amazing idea” or a solution to a problem, and sometimes you may even forget who this product is actually being designed for and whether or not they will like it or how they will interact with it.
Working on this MakerEd assignment was personally a very challenging experience not because of my limited technology experience but because I had to ask myself pertinent questions like:
- Is this product I am proposing actually going to solve the problem or will it create more problems?
- How can I put myself in place of the user to better understand their needs and design something that best suits them? What do they really want?
- How is this product different from the several other sign to speech or text technologies that have been developed?
To answer these questions and stay anchored to the problem I was trying to solve which was “Making the school environment more inclusive for speech impaired children”, I consulted several journals and read several articles. It seemed like the more I read, the more questions I had as these things are usually not very straight forward.
I however, got to understand the nuances and challenges that go with special education. I came to understand that, although special education is coined in one phrase, it means a lot of things and it covers hundreds of types of disabilities some of which are even yet to be discovered. Even though my project was focused on speech impairment, I came to learn that there are several kinds of speech impairment and the solution I was proposing could only target a specific group of children which was quite disappointing . But I had to content myself with the fact that I was at least doing something
This led me to come to the conclusion that technology is most efficient, when it is targeted at solving a particular problem rather than large groups of people.