THE IMPACT OF CISCO ACADEMY IT COURSES ON SPECIAL NEEDS STUDENTS AND TEACHING BEHAVIOR

Abstract

The objective of the research was to analyze the effectiveness of CISCO academy IT courses on special education student’s learning. ICT has tremendous potential to prepare special students for the workplaces globally and improve educational systems, if it’s integrated wisely into a curriculum of special education students, Cisco Academy IT courses are being sorted out at distinctive levels for the educators to outfit them with essential most recent information and abilities to make them great ICT educators due to auditory, visual and kinesthetic activities for learners and teachers in the IT course. This course has an updated 21^st century curriculum.

This study helps special students to engage international IT curriculum and get certified from Cisco Networking Academy. This study promotes the 21^st century skills of special needs students. This study design was quantitative. Purposive sampling was used to collect data. In this study the relationships between Cisco Academy IT courses and changes in teaching and learning behavior was investigated by conducting a course in 05 Schools of Karachi. The sample of study was randomly selected 100 students and 20 teachers from 05 private schools of Special education in Karachi. These schools were only facilitating special needs child related to academics and Cisco Networking Academy Course help the special students to learn about Hardware, Software, Social Media Virtual Community and internet. An effective questionnaire having 60 items, was developed and validated using Likert Scale. Regression and Pearson correlation will be used as analytical tools for the empirical estimation.

The finding of this study highlighted the relationship of updated Cisco networking academy courses and its impact on special students leaning are statistically significant due to auditory, visual and kinesthetic learning activities of these courses. The Pearson test explained that the correlation is linear with positive sign. This study recommended these courses in all private and public schools of Pakistan. These course helps special needs children schools to update IT curriculum and promote IT knowledge among special needs students. This course helps them to engage themselves as a IT teacher in this community.