With limited access to their teachers and peers, the shift to remote learning is especially disorienting for students with special needs. Non-adaptive technology in special education has the potential to frustrate students and put some tasks out of reach. That means the sudden shift to edTech isn't just challenging for special needs students—it's anxiety-producing.

Students with special needs struggle with low frustration tolerance and often require repeated explicit instruction through a gradual release model to learn new routines. Without regular individualized instruction, these students can find it difficult to access and use unfamiliar learning tools.

These challenges also put increased pressure on parents to onboard their child during home learning. Parents are already playing the role of a special educator, maintaining homeschooling schedules, and dealing with their regular responsibilities and commitments. Under these difficult circumstances, new or unfamiliar edTech tools can be additional barriers to learning.

Designing for Special Needs Makes Your edTech Product Better

As edTech designers and product owners, it's our job to re-think edTech tools for special education students and their families. Investing in accessible features is always worth it, but it's especially important now, when so many students are struggling with their education remotely.

Students with special needs are uniquely positioned to benefit most from the individualized, adaptive nature of edTech products. It is crucial for edTech designers to consider their needs during product design in order to make their products more accessible for all learners.

As you prepare to roll out new or improved distance learning tools, here are six crucial product areas you can evaluate for accessibility:

1. Log-in screens

Multi-step log-ins are, more often than not, a barrier to entry. Students must remember multiple class codes, logins, and passwords. For students with limited reading skills, this is an unnecessary source of frustration. QR codes or SSO integration for student accounts simplify this process. Ease user frustration or confusion by designing with integration patterns that students are already familiar with. 

2. Parent support

In addition to revisiting your onboarding flow for clarity, consider hosting video tutorials for parents within your product. These videos should emphasize how parents can support their child's learning with your tool, which will especially help parents who have students with special needs.

Providing certain kinds of student usage data to parents can also improve usability. Can parents easily view their child’s progress, or see where and how their child is struggling with content?

3. Teacher controls

To better support teachers, allow for increased data collection capabilities and customizations. This could include everything from the ability to monitor student customization features to setting and tracking progress for individual students. Even remotely, teachers should be able to clearly assess how students of all abilities are directing their own learning.

4. Data sharing

Allow teachers to easily share relevant information with parents. This will streamline teacher-parent collaboration on a child’s instructional plan and improve communication.

5. Customizable features

Adjustable text-size, text-to-speech software, and voice recording tools all provide students with different ways to access content and respond to teacher questions, instructional prompts, or assessments. When designers provide customization features, we set all learners up for success.

6. Self-paced learning

By designing a user flow that allows students to set their own pace, we empower them to take charge of their own learning and promote SEL growth. Self-paced learning tools also eliminate anxieties about keeping up with peers and help students focus on their own achievements. 

If you're considering updating your edTech products to address distance learning, now is the time to consider special needs students in your design. Simple customizations and other accessible features ease the pathway for all teachers and students who happen to use your products remotely. Ultimately, this will make your product more useful—and more valuable—to teachers and parents of all students, regardless of their ability.

Thank you to everyone who applied. We are no longer accepting applications but keep your eyes open for additional open positions in 2021. 

We're hiring! Backpack Interactive is a small but mighty strategy, UX and edTech design studio. We are committed to serving our educational and non-profit partners with products and interactive experiences that support teachers and students. We look to hire the very best design thinkers and problem solvers to join our award-winning team.

You’ll be responsible for creating beautiful, production-ready designs. You’ll work collaboratively with the Backpack and development teams to make sure products and experiences meet their educational goals while pushing design to the forefront.

If you’re an experienced designer who sees the big picture, revels in the small details, and is eager for the opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute to great work in a low-ego, maker-centric environment, then we should talk.

Skills and qualities we look for:

• 2–3 years of professional design experience
• A well-organized and relevant portfolio that demonstrates your creative problem-solving abilities
• An understanding of the end-to-end interactive design process
• Experience using appropriate UX methods and design thinking to inform solutions
• Willingness to jump into a project at any point and support on any and all design needs (i.e. Research, UX, UI, and Production) 
• Attention to detail
• Strong typography skills
• Expertise using digital design tools (i.e. Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD)
• Familiarity with Zeplin and experience with prototyping tools (i.e. Marvel or InVision)
• Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication and presentation skills
• Confidence in your expertise and perspective, but eager to learn from others
• A passion for working collaboratively
• Big plus: experience designing for kids, education or games
• Bigger plus: classroom experience 
• Gigantic plus: any knowledge of programming i.e. HTML, CSS,  JS

To apply for this position, please email hello@backpackinteractive.com with your cover letter, resume and a link to your online portfolio. Applications without portfolios and cover letters will not be considered. The position is for full-time work.

At Backpack Interactive, we love teachers. In any user experience research (UXR) we conduct, teachers frequently provide the best insights about how edTech products work in real classrooms across the country.

After all, edTech tools are an extension of what happens in the classroom. That's why it's important to consider teachers' needs in all the learning tools we design—even ones meant primarily for student use.

When we thought about the most effective way to learn more about teachers and their unique needs, we immediately imagined a group of dedicated classroom instructors who could help better inform our UX design choices.

As part of our continued commitment to user-centered design, we created the Teacher Council, a space for increased dialogue with our educator users. The Teacher Council will help us deepen our understanding of the unique needs and pain points educators face in the classroom. With more informed UXR, we'll create better products for our clients, whether they're building a classroom tool for teachers or students.

Even though teachers are experts on user experience in edTech, we know they're often left out of design conversations. That's why we also wanted to amplify educators' voices and give them a platform to advocate for the needs of their students, colleagues, and school communities.

With visions of teachers dancing in our heads, we used our professional networks and reached out to teachers recommended by our design partners. Some teachers even contacted Backpack with their perspectives on edTech proactively, so we knew they'd be game.

The Teachers Helping Backpack Interactive with edTech UXR

After weeks of hard work, we're proud to introduce Backpack Interactive's very first Teacher Council. Every month, the members of our Teacher Council will discuss a specific topic, like remote learning. They'll also be available for in-house user testing, research, and qualitative interviews about requirements, priorities, and features.

Please welcome our newest partners in UXR:

Flora Gitsis has taught both upper elementary and special education and served as Special Education District Administrator for K-12 schools in the largest school district in Indiana. She recently purchased a Peloton bike to help her exercise and unwind.

Scott Meyer-Kukan has nearly two decades of experience in the field of education and taught fourth grade in New York City in 2006. When he's not working on his doctoral degree in central office administration, he serves as a part-time archivist and genealogist. Scott lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Cody Moran teaches American Sign Language at Huntington Beach High School, where he has taught for the past six years. When he's not teaching, he loves traveling, camping, and playing sports.

Daniel Nero is a fourth-year English teacher at a Title I high school in Las Vegas, Nevada. He's an Alaska-to-Nevada transplant who loves to hike and read books.

Rachel Pauta is a 2nd grade Dual Language (Spanish) teacher at Brooklyn Arbor Public School K414 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She can’t be away from the ocean for too long and has a love/hate relationship with sleep.

Alicia Quan has taught 7th-grade Life Science and digital media courses in the Southern California area for five years. Follow her on Twitter and Insta at @ux_edtech, or queue up her podcast, UX of EdTech, in your favorite listening device.

Kylie Reiman is beginning a new position as a 9th grade physics teacher in Camden, NJ after spending three years teaching 7th- and 8th-grade science in the School District of Philadelphia. As a science teacher, she strives to create citizen-students who think critically about the world around them.

Dannielle Rivera teaches 2nd grade in a public school in a suburb in Southern California. She's married to her college sweetheart and a foster mama to a sweet, one-year-old boy. (Go Lakers!)

Jessica Seiler has taught 4th grade in Fairfax, Virginia for the past eight years. She holds a master's degree in Learning Technologies in Schools and has been ziplining more than 10 times.

How Backpack Interactive's Teacher Council Will Make edTech UX Better for Everyone

The educators on our Teacher Council are deeply interested in the field of UX and improving user experience based on their first-hand knowledge of edTech products. They see the potential in many edTech solutions but also see where some products miss the mark. They're eager to clarify misunderstandings that lead to inadequate edTech solutions and help us build stronger products that work for real teachers in real classrooms.

In the future, we hope to conduct more extensive research to support our assumptions about teacher needs and pain points. This will inform our discovery process and help clients move to the user testing phase even more quickly.

We can't wait to work with our Teacher Council to make edTech user experiences better for everyone—together.

Do you know a teacher who would be interested in joining our Teacher Council? Are you that teacher? Get in touch!