Objectives: Children with intellectual disabilities struggled to perform basic tasks in the educational platform due to their deferred learning pace and individual challenges. To assist such needs, the child's individual education program (IEP) team, spearheaded by the school administrators, continues to offer supplementary educational technologies. However, selecting an appropriate technology does not follow an objective system, making the decision process tedious and unreliable. Therefore, this paper provides a new perspective on analyzing the educational technologies for children with intellectual disabilities with respect to design factors that also constitute the technical specifications and ergonomic principles of technology design.
Method: To analyze the educational technologies, fuzzy best-worst method (BWM) and fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method are employed in a case study in the Philippines.
Impact: Results reveal that user perception is the most important design factor to be considered when selecting educational technology for children with disabilities. Furthermore, the adaptive educational platform has been found to best fit the needs of children with autism.
Keywords: Assistive technology; children with intellectual disability; educational technology; fuzzy BWM; fuzzy TOPSIS; information and communication technology.
The paper provides priority weights to design factors involved in developing educational technologies for children with intellectual disabilities (i.e., ADHD, cerebral palsy, down syndrome, and autism). These priority weights can be utilized by school administrators, technology developers, and parents of children with intellectual disability in designing an educational technology that best fits the individual needs of these children.The suitability of the educational technologies (i.e., sensor-based AI systems, assistive AI robots, and adaptive educational platforms) is assessed according to the design factors. The paper specifically proposed a ranking of alternative educational technologies that can optimize learning and development among children with intellectual disabilities. Furthermore, such results can also overcome the learning limitations among children with intellectual disabilities.