Customer.
Our customer is a state special school governed by a Board of Regents providing residential, academic, support, and outreach services to the students who are blind and visually impaired in New Mexico. Being an innovative leader and unifying entity in the field of educating students’ birth-high school who are blind or visually impaired, they aim to identify and ensure quality education through collaborative relationships with students, families, and local/state/national partners to provide outstanding advocacy, training, resources, and support services, thus ensuring that all students who are blind or visually impaired will become independent, productive members of their communities.
Challenge.
Being into the field of education for more than 10 decades, our customer wanted to know the birthrates of children within the state with visual impairments, which would help them to know the real birth rates and improve their service better. So, they started working in conjunction with public and private agencies to collect standardized epidemiological and demographic data regarding children, their visual conditions, and aimed to create systems to support them and families. Their goals were to
- Create a system to convey and receive information about blindness and visual impairment educational services, trends, research, etc.to all those involved or interested in serving students who are blind or visually impaired.
- Build a system of data-driven decision making that will be used collaboratively to determine goals, services and settings for educating blind and visually impaired students
- Develop a system that supports the successful transition of students with blindness or visual impairment and their programming across settings
Solution.
Client with a social good thought aimed to create a platform to consolidate the required data which supports continuum of care approached us with the above requirement. We analyzed and collected all the database and integrated within the system to easily serve the purpose.
The developed statewide database supports to track visually impaired students to achieve goal of early intervention. The ability to track students will enable access to critical services earlier in the educational process in order to set students up for success. Web and mobile friendly national registry helps to collect and save epidemiological and demographic data in a seamless and effective manner. The solution also addresses various aspects of private and public agency participation in the project and benefit from its implications on program development (including personnel preparation), program evaluation, and funding opportunities. More importantly an analysis and visualization module were included to understand the current trends. This module, trends shall be computed for questions such as impaired vision due to damage of brain, immature blood vessel impact in premature infants, underdeveloped optic nerves with or without additional midline brain misinformation etc., Database of Students shifting from one district to another will also be updated to search for the details of any student in real-time.
Result.
With the ability to retrieve aggregated data for research purposes, representing the child birth ratio helps to identify epidemiological trends in population, improve teacher preparation programs and increase quality of responsive EI services
- Easy to categorize students with their age, type of impairment/deficiency and gender
- Students starting aged Birth to the age in which they complete education (degree) will be saved in the official database for future references
- Enables students to register through the portal and create one-time account from which they can be able to request books using the form provided
Technology.
