I, in collaboration with Steven Pillay, decided to create a digital learning resource that reflects our professional backgrounds. As an early childhood educator (myself) and a pediatric doctor (Steven), developed a broad knowledge of children's development and we wanted to merge that knowledge to create a digital learning resource to help our target audience.
The aim of this course is to offer parents and child-carers an accessible introduction to developmental milestones and give practical examples of how to aid the child's development.
Developmental Milestones are an important tool for monitoring the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development of children (Scharf et al. 2016).
According to a Mott Poll, one-fifth of parents didn’t seek help from a healthcare or childcare provider when they thought their child’s development was delayed (National Poll on Children’s Health 2021).
The content will be based on HSE (Health Service Executive 2021) and CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022) guidelines and will include the newest update to the CDC guidelines, published by the AAP in February 2022 (Zubler et al. 2022). The DLR will include practical techniques from Grecia’s work as an early childhood teacher, secondary research on child development, and relevant websites such as Pathways (2022).
The primary target audiences for this course are new and soon-to-be parents. Most of this audience will be in their late 20s and early 30s (Central Statistics Office 2022) and are likely to have good digital literacy (Central Statistics Office 2021).
The secondary target audiences include child-carers, early childhood teachers, and those who work in pediatric healthcare.
The DLR will target native speakers of English and Spanish.
We plan to use Storyline 360, Adobe Animate, and PowToon to create this DLR. Storyline 360 will allow us to use our PowerPoint storyboards to help create the course, which will help us to focus on creating evidence-based content and delivery, as well as animations.