DigiAcademy - Ireland, Croatia, Spain, Sweden, and France
DigiAcademy is an inclusive digital skills education platform co-created with people with ID & services to deliver meaningful content deemed valuable by the community. With the app, learners can set their own learning plans.
Inclusive e-learning platform
Their goal is to support people with accessibility needs to access & use technology to improve quality of life. An interconnected goal of the project is creating accessible employment for people with ID who experience one of the lowest employment rates in Europe.
Together they have co-created & co-designed digital tech-based education content with & for people with ID delivered via a co-designed accessible video platform. The team believes in open science as a principle, & their recent publications reflect this as they are published as open access.
The education content is presented at a pace that the learner can adjust themselves. It is delivered as accessible video content, where learners can revisit topics as frequently as they like. Learners can create their own learning plan to dictate the pace of their learning & new supporter side of our app allows the learners to connect with key supporters.
Currently, DigiAcademy is the only accessible digital skills education solution that has been co designed with & for this community.
The people behind the ID
DigiAcademy has team of professionals working in the field of ID service providers, academic institutions with expertise in accessibility, ID, inclusive education, public health, speech & language therapy, brain health, engineering & start up technology partners across our European consortium.
Each EU Partner now recruit & run their own national panels, who work in their role as advisors to make recommendations to the research team in developing education content, reviewing all key project decisions & platform design.
DigiAcademy teachers are people with ID/autism who train their peers at a pace that meets their needs. They focus on accessibility features & functions of mainstream technologies to support digital access, & to empower learners to lead the digital lives of their choice.
Why is this a good practice?
From the onset, DigiAcademy has replicability as an integral component of the project as it is a pan European interdisciplinary project. DigiAcademy's partner countries, Croatia, France, Spain, and Sweden, replicate project elements, such as focus groups, in their own country to validate and expand on research findings.
Priority education content was identified via co-creation focus group discussions across the EU partnership. Recently, the lead research team based out of Trinity College Dublin have had the opportunity to make new connections with services and individuals with ID in the UK. This shows the potential for a wide global reach for the English Language version of the DigiAcademy app.
In addition to this, following a talk presented by the PI on DigiAcademy at at UNESCO Latin-EU link via the Unitversity of Alicante, there has also been increased interest in the Spanish Language version of the DigiAcademy app.
