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Project: Within Reach

Project Description

[Funded by the Department of Education, Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education, Learning Anytime Anywhere Program.]

The national shortage of professionals adequately trained to meet the needs of children who are blind and visually impaired is magnified in a state as large and diverse as Texas. Maintaining even a minimal number of teachers certified in Blindness and Visual Impairment (VI), and Orientation and Mobility (O & M) Specialists has been impossible in remote and rural areas of the state. The belief has been that to get VI professionals who will stay in rural areas of the state, they need to be "home grown", that is, they need to be already established in the area where the need exists. For this to be possible, the pre-service preparation that results in certification needs to go to them, rather than students going to the University in the traditional manner.

Vision professionals in the state had previously collaborated with the two universities that offered such pre-service training, and had developed some systems to provide training, however those systems were still inadequate to meet the needs of children with visual impairments in the state. Project Within Reach was developed and funded so that a variety of distance learning models for pre-service education for vision professionals could be systematically implemented and evaluated.

Major goals of the project:
1. To develop an effective and efficient distant education model that would increase the number of vision professionals in the field.

2. To evaluate 5 delivery methods of distant learning:

3. To develop a Mentor program as a part of our personnel preparation programs.

4. To disseminate project information and materials to professional preparation programs across the country for program replication

Project Evaluation:
A team from the Texas Center for Disability Studies at the University of Texas-Austin conducted the overall evaluation of the project. It found that Project Within Reach developed an efficient distance education model that can be replicated across the country. The "home grown" approach of recruiting teachers who already work in the geographic areas most in need, training them using accessible formats so that they don't have to leave their job or family, and promoting the within the existing school system, was very successful. (click on External Evaluation to see this evaluation.)


Final Report:
To obtain the final report for this project, click on Final Report.

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