About us

This website was developed by students of the Educational Technology (ET) programme at IIT Bombay. It was the group project in the Instructional Systems Design course (ET-614), Jan-Apr 2023 version. There were 3 post-doctoral, 17 PhDs and 3 Master’s students registered for the course. Of these, 10 were from 1st year, who took the course for credit. The others were senior students (including three post-PhD). Some of the senior students were also taking the course for the first time, while others had taken an earlier version of the course but attended again to participate in the project.

This course is at introductory level and typically covers instructional design models, processes, tools and technologies. For learning in a real-world setting, the students had to create a training program to make the community aware towards the needs of persons with disabilities (PwD). The students started with a high-level mandate - “To create awareness among the functionaries of higher education about the needs of differently abled persons”. They carried out stakeholder interviews (PwD student cell of IIT Bombay) and interacted with experts (Ummeed Child Development Center) to zero in on the topics and nature of the training material. Then they reviewed similar modules from other universities and went through relevant websites and YouTube channels, to decide the sub-topics and format of the material. They carried out the implementation in three phases - preliminary design, detailed design and content creation - with reviews and feedback after each. 

The students spent three hours per week in-class for both conceptual learning and project work. The time spent working on the project was variable but averaged at least three hours per week. The class was divided into four groups, each having a mix of junior and senior students. First, the topics for content creation were chosen - Autism, ADHD and learning disabilities, Locomotor disabilities and Visual impairment. Then a common template for the content was evolved - introductory video, depicting the point of view of a person with a disability, challenges faced by them and support strategies. Then the modules were developed iteratively, with the groups giving feedback to each other in frequent review presentations. After the development, four experts were invited to review the content, from the perspectives of instruction design, information accuracy, usefulness to PwD cell and to the student community. After revision, a user study on the usefulness and usability of the website was conducted with thirty students and three faculty, and some of their feedback was also incorporated. This whole effort happened over three months, while the students were also doing other courses, their own thesis work, etc. 

After the course, a fifth module of DHH (deaf and hard of hearing) was added by one of the MTech students as part of a summer internship. Four PhD students (one from each topic) also volunteered for a month-long summer project to create the main introductory videos and finalize the content of this website.

Upon completion of the website, the team presented the modules created to Ummeed Child Development Center. (Presentation link)

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Swati Pal (Convener, PwD student cell of IIT Bombay) and Mr. Karan Tanna (Member of PwD student cell and MDes student from IDC School of Design at IIT Bombay), for their suggestions and feedback on the training module from the stakeholder perspective. We also thank Prof. Sahana Murthy (from Educational Technology at IIT Bombay) for feedback on the content from instructional design perspective.

We are grateful to the Ummeed Child Development Center team for conducting a awareness workshop for us, providing initial suggestions as well as subsequent expert reviews, and sharing their outreach resources. Last but not least, we are grateful to the students with autism who interacted with us and enriched us by openly sharing their challenges and experiences. 

ISD Course Team

Instructors - Sridhar Iyer and Syaamantak Das

Teaching Assistant - Vishwas Badhe (3rd year PhD student)

Research Assistants - Sunita Raste, Daevesh Singh, Alekh V (4th year PhD students), Vishwas Badhe (3rd year PhD student)

Website management - Sunny Prajapati (1st year PhD student)

Credit students - Nisumba Soodhani, Sandeep Yadav, Sunny Prajapati, Ashish Garg, Nandipati Kisore, Avijit Pandey, Sonika Pal, Kritika, Zun Phoo, Arjun Prasad

Audit students - Ulfa Khwaja (5th year PhD student), Varun (4th year PhD student), Indrayani Nishane, Rajashri Priyadarshini, Spruha Satwalekar (3rd year PhD students), Jyoti Shah (2nd year PhD student)

Sit-through students - Amit Paikrao, Antony Prakash, Ishika, Sumitra Sadhukhan  (3rd year PhD students), Meera Pawar, Suprabha Jadhav, Setu Maheshwari, Ramdas Rai (2nd year PhD students), Veenita Shah, Sheeja Vasudevan, Anveshna (Post-Doctoral researchers) 

Post-course summer interns - Arjun Prasad, Zun Phoo, Sonika Pal (1st year PhD students), Nisumba Soodhani (2nd year PhD student), Avijit Pandey (2nd year MTech Student)