2022 AECT Outstanding Publication Award

CON faculty members Dr. Gigi Smith and Dr. Janelle Wagner’s co-authored paper "Learning Experience Design of an mHealth Intervention for Parents of Children with Epilepsy" has been awarded the 2022 Outstanding Publication award by the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. This prestigious honor is a tribute to the multidisciplinary and collaborative effort between MUSC, the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

“We are grateful to work with the Epilepsy Adherence in Children and Technology (eACT) team on the first multi-site psychological intervention trial for youth with epilepsy in the United States, and we are hopeful that this project will advance the field on media-based behavioral health interventions,” shared Smith and Wagner. “From the onset of this five year NIH funded project, the national eACT team has invited interprofessional collaboration, diversity, equity and inclusion, and an innovative media platform tailored to meet the needs of this underserved population. This experience has been unparalleled in our 20 years of epilepsy research.”

Their paper presents how learning experience design methods were used to create an mHealth intervention to be best usable to end-users, which are parents of children with epilepsy. Traditional instructional design practices were extended to include social, cultural, technological, and pedagogical considerations of the intended learner. It describes a learning intervention that considers the entire spectrum of human identification in its design, development, and evaluation.

MUSC is a sub-site of the study, which is ongoing and NIH funded.