Early Intervention On Line

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Federal and state laws require that young children with disabilities or who are at risk for developing disabilities be provided with Early Intervention services according to their developmental needs. But currently, there is a critical shortage of skilled EI providers. The primary reason for this shortage is a lack of educational and training programs. Except for some university-based programs that are often inaccessible to non-local students, most health care professionals, or those wishing to enter the field, do not have access to high-quality Early Intervention training programs. Moreover, today's professional early intervention workforce rarely has the time or flexibility to attend a fixed schedule of day or evening classes. One solution to these problems is Internet-based distance learning. The proposed Early Intervention training project, Early Intervention Online (EI Online) will develop, implement, and evaluate web-based distance learning courses designed to train health care professionals to provide Early Intervention services to children with developmental disabilities. EI Online will be developed by Praxis, Inc., a small health care software development company that specializes in programs for children with developmental disabilities, in partnership with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The project has three major objectives: (1) to develop curriculum materials that can be used for web-based Early Intervention instruction, (2) to develop a commercially viable software prototype, and (3) to evaluate the resulting program to determine the usability of the software and the effectiveness of the curriculum in teaching requisite competencies.