Making it personal: Understanding the online learning experience to enable design of an inclusive, integrated e-learning solution for students

Despite the availability of online learning applications and management systems used to deliver, house and organize e-learning content, students learning online continue to struggle with barriers that create an unnecessary disconnect between themselves and their peers, professors, the learning material and their parents (where applicable). Barriers personally experienced through participation in a synchronous online university-level graduate class, and documented barriers experienced by other students in similar distance learning environments, served as the primary narrative and driving incentive for this study. In addition to an extensive literature review, an in-depth study of a distance learning environment was conducted using an adaptation of Smart Design�s 6 Real People approach which included 5 persona�s, based on 5 real participants; a high school special needs class, a Masters of Inclusive Design Class, the Director of Education for Special Needs, A University Professor of Distance Learning, and a Visually Impaired User (Blind Participant). The users� experiences were documented through means of ethnographic observations, direct observations, and detailed interviews. Findings from these revealed many barriers and disruptions, including psychological, emotional, social, gender-related, environmental and cultural issues that were detrimental to class involvement and student success. These findings were then synthesized and applied to create a prototype, called inClass, developed to address these barriers and provide a model for a more cohesive, unified and accessible e-learning solution. Although this paper does not refer directly to design patterns, and does not claim to follow a pattern-based methodology it demonstrates some effective user-centred design techniques which pattern scouts and authors should consider as powerful tools for mining, elaborating and validating patterns

E-Learning

E-learning enables students to pace their studies according to their needs, making learning accessible to (1) people who do not have enough free time for studying - they can program their lessons according to their available schedule; (2) those far from a school (geographical issues), or the ones unable to attend classes due to some physical or medical restriction. Therefore, cultural, geographical and physical obstructions can be removed, making it possible for students to select their path and time for the learning course. Students are then allowed to choose the main objectives they are suitable to fulfill. This book regards E-learning challenges, opening a way to understand and discuss questions related to long-distance and lifelong learning, E-learning for people with special needs and, lastly, presenting case study about the relationship between the quality of interaction and the quality of learning achieved in experiences of E-learning formation

Teaching Disability Access in a Teaching of Writing Class

This essay argues for including in a teaching of writing class information on making documents, media, and other teaching materials accessible for people with disabilities

Repurposing Visual Input Modalities for Blind Users: A Case Study of Word Processors

Visual \u27point-and-click\u27 interaction artifacts such as mouse and touchpad are tangible input modalities, which are essential for sighted users to conveniently interact with computer applications. In contrast, blind users are unable to leverage these visual input modalities and are thus limited while interacting with computers using a sequentially narrating screen-reader assistive technology that is coupled to keyboards. As a consequence, blind users generally require significantly more time and effort to do even simple application tasks (e.g., applying a style to text in a word processor) using only keyboard, compared to their sighted peers who can effortlessly accomplish the same tasks using a point-and-click mouse. This paper explores the idea of repurposing visual input modalities for non-visual interaction so that blind users too can draw the benefits of simple and efficient access from these modalities. Specifically, with word processing applications as the representative case study, we designed and developed NVMouse as a concrete manifestation of this repurposing idea, in which the spatially distributed word-processor controls are mapped to a virtual hierarchical \u27Feature Menu\u27 that is easily traversable non-visually using simple scroll and click input actions. Furthermore, NVMouse enhances the efficiency of accessing frequently-used application commands by leveraging a data-driven prediction model that can determine what commands the user will most likely access next, given the current \u27local\u27 screen-reader context in the document. A user study with 14 blind participants comparing keyboard-based screen readers with NVMouse, showed that the latter significantly reduced both the task-completion times and user effort (i.e., number of user actions) for different word-processing activities

The Question-driven Dashboard: How Can We Design Analytics Interfaces Aligned to Teachers’ Inquiry?

One of the ultimate goals of several learning analytics (LA) initiatives is to close the loop and support students’ and teachers’ reflective practices. Although there has been a proliferation of end-user interfaces (often in the form of dashboards), various limitations have already been identified in the literature such as key stakeholders not being involved in their design, little or no account for sense-making needs, and unclear effects on teaching and learning. There has been a recent call for human-centred design practices to create LA interfaces in close collaboration with educational stakeholders to consider the learning design, and their authentic needs and pedagogical intentions. This paper addresses the call by proposing a question-driven LA design approach to ensure that end-user LA interfaces explicitly address teachers’ questions. We illustrate the approach in the context of synchronous online activities, orchestrated by pairs of teachers using audio-visual and text-based tools (namely Zoom and Google Docs). This study led to the design and deployment of an open-source monitoring tool to be used in real-time by teachers when students work collaboratively in breakout rooms, and across learning spaces

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Middle Level Education Aims for Equity and Inclusion, but Do Our School Websites Meet ADA Compliance?

An often-overlooked component of a middle school website is the necessity for that website to be accessible to those with disabilities, while following the guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act. In support of the belief that support the belief that inclusive education and respect for diversity should be integrated throughout the school, this study investigated the accessibility of middle school websites in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio by selecting a random sample of 150 schools and analyzing their homepages using WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator), which reports accessibility violations by annotating a copy of the page that was evaluated and presenting embedded icons and indicators to disclose breaches with ADA. Out of 150 districts, 54% had errors that need immediate attention and all 150 schools had alerts of likely violations that ranged from alt-text omissions and empty or confusing links to issues with color contrast and keyboard-only navigation. The article proceeds to give practical suggestions for eliminating many of the errors, even for those shareholders with less than sophisticated technological expertise

Designing and Evaluating Accessible E-Learning for Students with Visual Impairments in K-12 Computing Education

This dissertation explores the pathways for making K-12 computing education more accessible for blind or visually impaired (BVI) learners. As computer science (CS) expands into K-12 education, more concerted efforts are required to ensure all students have equitable access to opportunities to pursue a career in computing. To determine their viability with BVI learners, I conducted three studies to assess current accessibility in CS curricula, materials, and learning environments. Study one was interviews with visually impaired developers; study two was interviews with K-12 teachers of visually impaired students; study three was a remote observation within a computer science course. My exploration revealed that most of CS education lacks the necessary accommodations for BVI students to learn at an equitable pace with sighted students. However, electronic learning (e-learning) was a theme that showed to provide the most accessible learning experience for BVI students, although even there, usability and accessibility challenges were present in online learning platforms. My dissertation engaged in a human-centered approach across three studies towards designing, developing, and evaluating an online learning management system (LMS) with the critical design elements to improve navigation and interaction with BVI users. Study one was a survey exploring the perception of readiness for taking online courses between sighted and visually impaired students. The findings from the survey fueled study two, which employed participatory design with storytelling with K-12 teachers and BVI students to learn more about their experiences using LMSs and how they imagine such systems to be more accessible. The findings led to developing the accessible learning content management system (ALCMS), a web-based platform for managing courses, course content, and course roster, evaluated in study three with high school students, both sighted and visually impaired, to determine its usability and accessibility. This research contributes with recommendations for including features and design elements to improve accessibility in existing LMSs and building new ones

Accessibility Issues in HTML5 A Comparison of HTML5 Websites and Those Coded in Earlier Versions

It is estimated that by 2020 there could be as many as 4 million visually impaired or blind people living in the UK. These visually impaired or blind people will use assistive technologies such as screen readers to access website content on the internet. Currently the governing body of the internet, the World Wide Web Consortium has released and continues to develop a new standard of the HTML markup language which is used to code website content. This new HTML standard, HTML 5 has been heralded as a new semantically correct markup language. HTML 5 should be more accessible to users of assisted technologies and should also facilitate the incorporation into websites of rich internet applications and other media in a more accessible way. However the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) have suggested that the opposite may be proving to be true and that HTML 5 websites may be more inaccessible than websites coded in earlier versions of HTML. This study employs a mixed methods methodology, including screen reader accessibility testing and web developer interviews. This methodology will establish the accessibility of HTML 5 coded websites and prove or disprove the hypothesis of the RNIB while adding granularity and perspective to the results of the testing