Abstract:

The inclusive education policy has been adopted in many regions around the world to help children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) better integrate into the local school community and the society by placing them in mainstream schools. In the inclusive education setting, children with ASD may often need interventions and supports from their schoolteachers, in order to achieve academic success in the school curriculum. However, the teachers often feel that there is a lack of enabling tools and/or learning materials for them to deliver the interventions and supports properly in the setting. Previous empirical studies have shown that Virtual Reality (VR), a set of technologies that are capable of creating a safe and authentic learning environment with great flexibility and interactivity, is a promising tool for fulfilling the special learning needs of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, based on the authors’ previous experience in Hong Kong, although the teachers welcome the VR enabled learning approaches and empirical evidence has strongly demonstrated the effectiveness, it is often found that the approaches can hardly be sustained after the studies ended. This may due to the fact that most of the teachers lack the necessary knowledge and skills in operating the VR devices as well as in providing proper interventions and supports to the children when needed during the process. Since 2018, the authors started to address the issue by designing and implementing a training approach, which aimed at equipping the teachers with necessary knowledge and skills to provide VR enabled learning for children with ASD in a self-sustainable manner. In this paper, the motivation of the study, the training design and its underlying rationale, statistical data, and qualitative feedback from the teachers who participated in the training are shared and discussed. By the end of 2019, 76 teachers from 22 local schools in Hong Kong have completed the training and helped to provide VR enabled learning to 171 children with ASD in their schools. The results guaranteed the sustainability of the VR enabled learning in Hong Kong’s inclusive education setting.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, autism spectrum disorder.