MSc Educational Assistive Technology: Training a new professional group

The novel MSc Educational Assistive Technology (EduAT), (University of Dundee, 2022) is relevant to the Communication Matters conference due to the valuable contribution that the emerging assistive technologist profession can make to the assessment, provisioning and ongoing support of AAC and allied AT systems. This presentation provides an overview of the unique EduAT curriculum and the methods we have developed to train assistive technologists. The CM conference played a pivotal role in the inception of EduAT. Following a 2014 presentation on the Dart project (Slaughter and Mobbs, 2015), Professor Annalu Waller (University of Dundee, 2022) approached the author regarding the AT training method described. Based on this work began that resulted in MSc EduAT. The MSc EduAT has six core modules. These are briefly described in the 5-minute AT short on MSc EduAT recorded for the Natspec TechAbility 2021 conference. (Natspec, 2021) In addition to the 100 credits of core modules, students take 40 elective credits and choose a project dissertation that is worth 40 credits. The Dart project curriculum has inspired our approach, and has been expanded upon considerably. The EduAT competency framework was developed by the author, based on work to define the Assistive Technologist role in the ESCO (ESCO, 2022) database. The author collaborated with Neil Beck and Fil McIntyre from the Natspec TechAbility service to support the creation of the ESCO ‘occupation’ for the assistive technologist. The AT elements in the EduAT framework are mapped to the TechAbility Standards. The author has previously defined the assistive technologist role in the Communication Matters journal article from Vol. 29 No. 1 (Slaughter, 2014). The first module utilises a guided tutorial to undertake a supportive gap analysis using the EduAT competency framework. Based on the identified learning opportunities we suggest elective modules from Education, Computing and Health / Therapy.