Knowledge Trainings on Autism Spectrum Disorders for Teachers in Tanzania: The Mobile Phone Solution.

Background: In Tanzania, there is emerging awareness of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the general population and few resources dedicated to serving the needs of children with ASD (Manji & Hogan, 2013). The use of distance learning interventions has emerged as a feasible option for promoting ASD knowledge. Tanzania has a mobile phone penetration rate close to 70 percent and counts telecommunications as its fastest-growing sector (Reuters, 2016), so this intervention specifically capitalizes on the fast developing technology infrastructure in the country.

Objectives: The current project delivers a sustainable alternative to face to face ASD knowledge trainings for teachers in Tanzania. This project is the first virtual ASD training conducted in the country and is unique in that it has enabled participants to use their phones to access trainings with flexibility of completion time and location.

Methods: The training launched in July 2018 with 100 teachers in Arusha, Tanzania. The training will be available online until December 31st 2018. Seventy nine users have accessed the training to date with 35 users completing the entire training (female, N=27; male, N=8). The training was developed by clinicians from a U.S. based social benefit orgranization, (OMPACO). The content of the training is based on live trainings the organization currently provides in Tanzania. The training included information about ASD in seven modules and is available to teachers in English and Swahili. Teachers access the training through a website and the training is formatted to be viewed on both SMART phones and feature phones. A pre-test measure established baseline autism knowledge, and five-item quizzes at the end of each module that assessed user learning of information from each module.

Results: Reliability results for the pretest measure were fair (Cronbach’s alpha=.542) and the mean pretest score for all users was 35.72 correct out of a possible 48 items. The training modules with the highest user participation were Etiology (English, N=28; Swahili, N=22) and Assessment and Diagnosis (English, N=24; Swahili, N=24). The highest average quiz scores was on the module related to IEP development (English, N=96%; Swahili, N=73%).

Conclusions: Total user participation was high (79 users out of 100). On the section quizzes, there was a high completion rate and high scores across the modules. The mean pretest score of 35.72 indicated fair to high baseline autism knowledge among teachers who completed the training (74% score on the measure). Future research could explore the possibility of providing trainings to the general community as a way of scaling up the intervention to a larger populatoin. For a pilot launch, these results provide an encouraging step towards bringing awareness of ASD to the teacher community in Tanzania via the use of mobile phone technology.

References

Manji, K.P. & Hogan M.N. (2013). Identifying gaps in knowledge, prevalence and care of children with autism spectrum disorder in Tanzania. Tanzania Medical Journal, 26(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.4314/tmj.v26i2.3

Reuters News Report. (2016). The Reuters Institute for Study of Journalism. Digital News Report 2016.