Students are engaged in the platform and excited to practice delivering assessments. As a professor, it’s helpful that I can access a range of content, activities, and assessments all within one central platform so that I can show my students a variety of real life scenarios.
Overview
Presence’s Kanga platform has been a central tool for Professor Tiffany Gaines across all of her various roles, providing her with powerful new tools to serve all her students effectively and help them to succeed.
Challenge
In Fall of 2021, Professor Tiffany Gaines was faced with the challenge of having to teach diagnostic methodology in a hybrid format to a mix of undergraduate and graduate Speech Pathology students. Not only was it difficult to integrate traditional paper protocols and manuals, but she soon realized that her students would face similar challenges when they entered the workforce.
As a result of the pandemic, Professor Gaines was faced with a new challenge at her university: effectively teaching her undergraduate and graduate students who were learning in dispersed ways—some in-person, some virtual, and some in a hybrid setting.
She needed better tools to teach and deliver diagnostics. She also needed to better prepare her students for a future that likely would include hybrid work environments.
Solution
Professor Gaines was familiar with Presence’s Kanga platform. As a school-based provider, she had administered many assessments on the platform and understood that it replaced the need for traditional easel and instructional manuals.
She purchased an independent license for Kanga and began using it in her classroom to demonstrate how the platform could be used to do remote evaluations and administer assessments. Her students were able to role-play as clinicians and as students, similar to real life scenarios. Students were also able to practice the diagnostic skills they were learning in the classroom, increasing their understanding, application, and compliance with protocols.
Kanga allowed Professor Gaines to introduce a more practical and immersive learning experience for her students.
Results
Her undergraduate and graduate students learned a new modality while integrating activities they were familiar with from a traditional school-based setting.
The ease of having instruction and practice delivery on one comprehensive platform reduced the strain on limited clinical supplies. According to Professor Gaines, the students love Kanga.
Moving forward, Professor Gaines plans to continue incorporating the Kanga platform into her instruction and she believes that many of her students, including her peers, will benefit from leveraging Kanga as they return to in-person instruction, assessment, and therapy delivery.
