In Mexico there are units of consultants that help schools to make students with special needs be included in regular education they provide the necessary help to enhance the learning process. Their work implies adapting the learning methodology, complementing the planned academic activities, adapting learning goals to the students' needs, providing specific technological tools, analyze the knowledge acquisition, etc. Additionally, there are many factors that can affect these goals and complicate the whole intervention process. The COVID-19 pandemic is making attitudinal changes of students, together with the long academic brake, and the forced on-line learning. Together, consultants, teachers, parents, and scientists have analyzed gaps in the intervention process of the supporting units, related with collaboration, teamwork, adaptations in activities and knowledge acquisition, and proposed a solution to it. In this chapter, the authors present Scrum process as a feasible solution, making easy and stronger the collaboration, role definition, and goals prioritization.
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In Mexico, the Support Units for Regular Education (USAER, by its name in Spanish Unidades de Servicio y Apoyo a la Educación Regular) are the entities to which the regular schools turn students with special educational needs to ensure their inclusion. The USAER team includes specialists in psychology, pedagogy, social work, and communication. The Secretary of Education in Mexico has developed a route of intervention that involves four stages: Diagnose, Intervention, Implementation and Assessment, this is called the Educational Rehabilitation Process Model (ERPM).
Despite its great definition of activities and its applicability, the ERPM does not include the implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a coordinated process. The inclusion of a team ICT experts, such as educational technology experts, software engineers, systems engineers, interface designers and developers, as part of the USAER team can enhance the ERPM incorporate Digital Content (in the form of learning objects, educational software, mobile applications, or a combination of them) to complement the support strategy and the whole intervention of the USAER team, with the possibility of include the school community, and the student family.
Nevertheless, the coordination and collaboration between this ICT specialists and the USAER team might be guided by a methodology that helps achieve objectives quickly according with the evolution of the students; might include the most important current learning objectives; should promote communication between different areas of expertise; and might be managed as an iterative process.
The agile methodology of SCRUM has all desired characteristics to be implemented into the ERPM. This is the main topic of the chapter: To know how the roles, tools, artefacts, teams, and work management are implemented producing a solution to enhance education of students with SEN.
One important thing to consider is the long academic break due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the loos of consciousness produced by consequence. The loss of consciousness of students after a prolonged school break is not a new research topic. Various authors have addressed this problem (Cooper, 2020), (Von Hippel, 2019), (McEachin & Atteberry, 2017), (Quinn & Polikoff, 2017); However, nowadays we are in a situation with peculiar characteristics. The period of the health contingency by COVID-19, required the suspension of classroom activities from the end of March, taking approximately three months of work at home, to close the school year. The Mexican Ministry of Education has included a reinforcement plan beginning with the Summer Fun programs and the Remedial Course for the resumption of activities. The Summer Fun, comprises a set of recreational, recreational and recreational activities for Basic Education students during the summer school break, while the remedial course involves the staggered return of students to the classrooms and will serve to answer questions and lags (SEP, 2020b). Now the question is: How should USEAR teams must adequate all this content?
New technologies such as mobile technology, augmented reality, and cloud computing provide tools with great potential to assist in the teaching-learning process for students with special educational needs associated with a disability, but that's only one point in favor. It is necessary to create adjustment schemes according to the students’ needs, create agile implementation models within the current teaching-learning process, as well as evaluation methods to verify the success of the application of tools and the effective learning of students. Our proposal: implement SCRUM, understanding that educational technology tools are not everything.
Figure 1. USAER’s support process. Inspired from (SEP, 2011)
Currently, USAER support services are based on the process presented in Figure 1 (SEP, 2011). As it can be seen, throughout the four moments, the activities are accompanied by monitoring instruments (school and classroom folders) which are used to monitor the progress of the students, and the effectiveness of the support program.