Let’s make a project that will rise awareness about learning disorders! That is Logopsycom’s constant mission and now 2 years after the approval of MOOC DYS by European Commission we are close to the finish line of the project. But it does not mean it’s the end.
Despite an increase of general awareness of public authorities and educative world, there is still a lot to do to properly enhance the access, participation and learning performance of those disadvantaged learners. There is not a day that does not show how many stereotypes people with learning disorders need to face. Indeed, many of the affected pupils are not treated as they should in school, many are catalogued as “dumb” or “lazy” which generates a great frustration for them and their relatives. Many of those are sent redirected to educative trajectories they don’t belong to, VET or special education. In France for instance some classes of VET schools have up till 60% of the pupils who have a learning disorders while the average in the population is around 15%. But the problem is also very present for the teachers and educative stakeholders who are also often powerless by lack of practical training and tools to deal with these special students.
In our opinion, one of the needed solution to make the schools more inclusive for the people with “dys” is to spread the awareness about their difficulties and increase the skills to face them, which is why we worked to create a specific MOOC on the topic for all actors of the education (experts, teachers, educators, families and youngsters themselves).
Content production was a result of collaborative work between us Logopsycom (as the leader of the project) and several international partners: Formation 3.0 (France), Civiform (Italy), DLBC Lisbonne (Portugal), University of Pitesti (Romania) and KE.D.D.Y. (Greece).
The stakeholders in the production that supported us in the process were: FFDys: the French Federation of Dys, Les Apprimeurs, Dyslexia Romania and Dyspraxia Ireland.
The interest and attendance in the project were beyond our expectations. Over 15 thousand participants from different countries for 6 weeks learn (among others) about:
- What is DYS and what is not? Importance of raising awareness about DYS
- Facts and features of learning disorders: dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, dysphasia
- Impact of DYS in classroom and at home
- Tools and adaptation techniques for teachers
- Support methods for parent’s
For practical reasons, the MOOC focused on pupils between 6 to 18 years old. Indeed, it is the age range where the “dys’orders” are usually detected and the needs become crucial. We acknowledge that there is not much information available for adults that still facing difficulties and as we received a lot of positive feedback in one section of the MOOC which talked about SLD in adult life we are considering deepening the topic in future projects.
95% of participants that took the feedback survey consider the MOOC as a success and as the creators we are very happy with their positive responses. The community around the MOOC was very active through all the course and provided exceptional added value to the content. Even though the MOOC is finished the discussions are still alive on project fanpage.
During the 2019 summer partners are working on two practical toolboxes (one for the parents and youngsters and one for the teachers) to improve the conditions for personalized teaching and learning in order to support DYS pupils and on a syllabus or text format of the course.
Also, we are in the preparation of big closing conference which will take place on 24.10.2019 in Mons (Belgium).
More information you can find here: www.logopsycom.com/fr/evenements