sped@home

sped@home is a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 compliant Learning Management System (LMS), that aids learners with unique needs.

Traditional education is inaccessible to youth with mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral disabilities. In pre-COVID-19 times, the high cost of special education, inadequate special facilities and talents, and inexistent socio-economic support to underserved, invisible sectors have driven most and their families into poverty, dependence, and hopelessness. During COVID-19, they have been pushed down the priority list as economies have been thriving to stay afloat. 

Virtualahan will develop, maintain, and scale WCAG 2.0 compliant LMS we call sped@home. We will address the unique learning needs of this sector during COVID-19 and beyond. The cloud will house K-12 content as prescribed by the Department of Education. At the minimum, we will feature Filipino Sign Language (FSL) interpretation, close captioning, screen reading, and some assistive technologies. Wherever learners are, so long as they have access to internet connection and computer, they must learn unimpeded. 

We will ensure our learners are digital-ready, can thrive in the digital space, and ultimately become productive citizens of the future. We will partner with organizations that can provide connectivity and computers. We will partner with learning institutions that can rollout sped@home, share our common desire for safe spaces, and provide wellbeing care.

sped@home can also serve regular learners. And the beauty of this, we can promote diversity and inclusion to young minds by mainstreaming other kids different from them and that's totally okay.

Within 5 years of successful-run, sped@home will scale not only in the ASEAN but in the rest of the world that needs education technology empowerment.

Youth learners with disabilities lack access to accessible K-12 basic education before and especially during the pandemic. 

Most, if not all, schools are designed to cater only to traditional learners. Their facilities, instructions, and educators are ill-equipped to serve youth learners with unique needs and their expansion plans are skewed towards traditional learners. The infrastructure around said schools such as roads, transportation networks, and the like are unfriendly to learners with unique needs. Should there be learning institutions catering to said sector, only few families with adequate financial means can afford the prohibitive cost of special education.

Factoring Octava's 25.7% estimate of persons belonging to school attending age group in the ASEAN region with the Philippine estimate of 12M population of persons with disability, there are easily at least 3M belonging to said school attending age group who are unschooled and/or have little or no access to K-12 basic education in the country. And the small number who used to have access before the pandemic is greatly reduced today because of the ongoing and ever-changing pandemic protocols.

By making sped@home digitally available anywhere in the country where there is internet connectivity, learners with unique needs can continue basic K-12 education at home, where the environment is safe and healthy, devoid of the daily struggles of inaccessible public infrastructure, facilities, instructions, educators, and, at present, the constant threat of COVID-19 exposure.

The unschooled learners we target to serve are those belonging to families falling from very poor families to middle-class families. They are persons in school-age groups who are confined at home because their families are unable to send them even to a neighborhood public school due to socio-economic constraints.

Basic K-12 education, being the foundational skills of all adult skills, is crucial to give them a fighting chance at a productive, independent life. 

In Virtualahan, as we train our adult learners with disabilities with digital skills and prepare them for the digital job market, most prospective employers almost always require an undergraduate diploma. At the very least, said employers relax their criteria to cater with at least 2 years in college and/or even further, a graduate of K-12 basic education, as the bare minimum. Our learners do not progress in most employers' selection process, no matter how trained, experienced, disciplined, promising, and committed they are for the available job relative to their traditional counterparts, because of one single requirement - diploma.

Last year, we helped learners with disabilities and chronic conditions attend K-12 education using the blended learning approach. We monitor their progress and consult their parents, guardians, and teachers regularly. Amazingly, most of them thrive in the digital classroom and finished the year on top of their class. 

Along with stakeholders, we are one in our findings. If given a chance, learners with unique needs will thrive and excel given the right environment, tools, and support system.

sped@home is a WCAG 2.0 compliant LMS that will address accessibility issues plaguing the K-12 basic education space at present. 

First, it serves learners with disabilities and chronic conditions to learn content at their pace, using a platform that is responsive to their unique needs. 

Second, it provides a platform to educators without accessibility competency to create coursewares that not only cater to traditional learners but also, and most importantly, include learners with unique needs. 

And lastly, if successful, sped@home (its courseware, its educational instructions, its best practices, etc.), being Department of Education-compliant, WCAG2.0 compliant, streamlined, consistent, standardized to serve all K-12 levels, can be scaled wherever in the Philippines, and tweaked for the ASEAN region, and ultimately, in the rest of the world. 

With economies of scale that sped@home can provide, the cost of basic K-12 education can be greatly reduced, especially to the poor and middle-class learners. Its reach can be far and wide, encompassing even learners with no unique needs and educators with little to no accessibility competency. It ensures the least exposure to COVID-19 and other pandemics in the future. And ultimately, its impact in tooling the underserved for success in life.

I am the team lead of sped@home. My name is Mario Antonio Salcedo, concurrently Vice President of Virtualahan Inc.

sped@home is not just any other Learning Management System. 

It is an LMS, compliant to WCAG 2.0 and Department of Education curriculum. It aims to address the unique learning needs of learners with disabilities to finish K-12 basic education. It seeks to address the accessibility gaps in the existing traditional learning model.

Further, sped@home is an ecosystem that helps traditional schools migrate to digital education while making parents and guardians be more involved and hands-on in the lives of their learners throughout their K-12 learning journey.

Because Virtualahan graduates are discriminated from job applications due to lack of school diploma, last year, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we enrolled 5 school-age learners with disabilities and chronic conditions to a private Christian school in Cebu to ascertain if persons with disabilities can be helped to graduate from K-12 basic education and eventually proceed to undergraduate degree remotely because they already hold a Learner Reference Number (LRN) issued by the Department of Education, a primary requisite to enter college.

At the end of the schoolyear, most of our scholars did not only thrive, but excelled in their classes. The confirmation of this need analysis is very crucial for my team to proceed with sending scholars to private schools in the current schoolyear and collaborating with a private Christian school in creating sped@home LMS platform.

Learning Management System (LMS) will be our foundational blueprint. Virtualahan currently has its own that caters only to at most 25 to 30 learners at any given time using open source technology such as moodle under Microsoft cloud. This LMS is not WCAG 2.0 compliant.

In more than 5 years of training and helping around 700 persons with disabilities holistically become thriving digital professionals, we have created a community adept with accessibility skills that can create accessible content and test the same to comply with WCAG 2.0.

Our technology is driven by the accessibility skills of our community and technology partners that confirmed our vision for a WCAG 2.0 compliant sped@home LMS platform is doable within a year's time.

For persons with disabilities and chronic conditions become independent, productive citizens, opportunities for skills training and development are crucial. 

To be able to get them into training schools or even college, each must at least have the basic education skillsets that only K-12 basic education can provide. Of course, a diploma attesting they finished K-12 basic education is primordial as they journey though their formal education.

our solution, sped@home, will provide this underseved sector an option to continue and finish K-12 basic education especially at this time of COVID-19, at the confines of their homes, at a very affordable price.

And for most, especially the existing learners with unique needs that we sent to a private school this schoolyear, this is their only option to start or continue their K-12 basic education.

By giving sped@home as a viable option to the underserved, we are confident that whatever path they choose to take eventually in life, armed with a K-12 diploma they can thrive as independent productive adults.

In general, learners with unique needs must graduate to the next level in the K-12 spectrum is our primary measure of progress.

Should they qualify to be accelerated (from level 3, jumping to level 5, etc.), this is again another indicator of progress.

Ultimately, our learners must graduate from K-12 and hold a diploma to be able to proceed to either vocational training or undergraduate studies.

For the first year, by the end of 2022 to early 2023, sped@home must be fully tested and ready for roll out for schoolyear 2023-2024 in the Philippines to at least 3 schools in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

In the next 3 to 5 years, after having successfully run and scaled sped@home to at least 10 schools in the Philippines, we will be transferring technology outside the Philippines with the main maintenance and support center still based in the Philippines and primarily run by community members in Virtualahan.

We already reached out to software development professionals and accessibility experts to ascertain the viability of sped@home to be developed in less than 1 year. I am happy to inform you that we have them all excited and in the affirmative. 

But for a nonprofit social enterprise, unfortunately, raising at least 5M Philippine Peso to finance sped@home development is a major barrier. I am happy that we have this opportunity to present to you this funding opportunity to help us realize our platform and help the underserved in my country.

Our founder, because of his disability and chronic condition, was discriminated of a rewarding career in healthcare after graduation. Along with his family and friends, they put up Virtualahan to primarily train and help persons with disability thrive in the digital workspace. 5 years into the future, with 700 graduates and at least 500 gainfully working digitally, a major barrier to penetrate multinationals, small to medium enterprises, and government is the lack of diploma and formal education credentials. 

Our graduates are discriminated at the start of the selection process for failure to submit a diploma regardless of work experience and other credentials. Further probing, most of them, because of their disabilities and chronic conditions, are unable or prevented to go to school as the traditional school are not wired to serve their unique needs.

Because of this, we wanted future generations of persons with disabilities and chronic conditions, who will be subjected to job discrimination and the like, will be armed with a diploma and basic skill sets to thrive in the future of work.

72 people.

7 Full-time persons broken down into 2 computer programmer level 3, 1 information officer level 3, 1 project manager, 3 project staff.

65 Part-time persons broken down into 1 UI/UX/Usability Specialist, 4 Accessibility Specialists, 30 Testers, and 30 content developers.

For more than 5 years, Virtualahan has been using education technology to help persons with disabilities and other minority groups to become economically independent and socially adjusted Filipinos by providing digital skills training, employment support, and wellbeing care.

For more than 1 year and ongoing, we help send school-age persons to a K-12 private school to ascertain the viability of sped@home ecosystem and platform.

If supported by Octava, we will be able to finally assemble our solutions team and develop the sped@home.

As a lead, it was daunting to onboard parents to entrust their kids with unique needs to us, whom they shielded from discrimination. It was hard to sell the concept to private schools and finally convince an ally to support the vision. It was challenging to get organizations to provide devices and internet connectivity to our partner school and family beneficiaries. 

But what validated our sped@home is the infectious excitement of these kids when presented with the opportunity of school.

Digitally, their eyes welled with joy, gladness, and hope. Their voices (because some cannot show their deformed faces) cracked with restraint sobs of excitement. All these wiped all our doubts and fears. 

My team and I and the entire leadership are blessed to have been planted the seed of purpose to extend help where help is needed most. 

The kids themselves, despite their conditions, are all-in. Who are we to doubt this gift to serve our younger counterparts - the kids with disabilities?

We believe in this project, how impactful and scalable this is, especially now that we are confined at home if profiled as non-essentials.

It took COVID-19 to realize that the time of sped@home has arrived.

Our partner school is Talamban Christian School is based in Cebu. We enrolled the kids, located all over the Philippines, in their K-12 program. They use a self-paced, blended (digital and modular) approach, assisted by an online teacher.

We closely monitor how the kids with unique needs are performing compared to other kids through the assigned teacher. We talk to the kids and their parents and guardians regularly to assess the home learning environment and how else we can help them improve the kids learning journey.

The Octava Social Innovation Challenge/MIT Solve is a program/organization that perfectly fits sped@home/Virtualahan. We both recognize the value of education and technology as a determinant and enabler to a progressive region, especially to a future where pandemics must already be part of the equation.

It harnesses education technology to aid unserved and underserved school-aged learners to have access to quality and relevant K-12 basic education and position its beneficiaries' end-users for success. It prepares countries to technology-enabled standard courseware designs and minimum verifiable skillsets for all learners, educators, and stakeholders. 

By putting education technology front and center, Octava/MIT drives the ASEAN to adapt to the changing education landscape so no one is left behind. As an education technology champion, Virtualahan seeks to deliver quality, affordable, and standardized education through sped@home in the K-12 basic education space in the Philippines.

Currently, we have identified software developers, partner schools, and organizations to conceptualize and validate the feasibility of sped@home. We already penciled numbers and cost components and chalked in timelines from development to roll-out. The only remaining, and one of the most important, is getting a funding partner that will not only provide grants but help ensure we are able to break into the ASEAN region and the rest of the world once sped@home has proven its successful run in the Philippines.