Using MOOCs to Promote Digital Accessibility and Universal Design, the MOOCAP Experience

The recently completed Massive Open Online Course for Accessibility Partnership project (MOOCAP), had the twin aims of establishing a strategic partnership around the promotion of Universal Design and Accessibility for ICT professionals and of developing a suite of Open Educational resources (OERs) in this domain. MOOCAP\u27s eight university partners from Germany, Norway, Greece, Ireland, the UK and Austria have a significant history in developing and providing courses in the domains of Universal Design and Accessibility, as well as leading research and advocacy roles within Europe. The MOOCAP project consisted of two phases: the development of an introductory MOOC on Digital Accessibility and the delivery of set of online courses with more in-depth and focused learning topics. During the lifetime of the project over 10,000 students signed up for these courses. This paper reflects on the challenges of creating and delivering MOOCs, especially in topics around Digital Accessibility and Universal Design. It considers the outcomes, impacts and legacies of the project. Based on our experiences of integrating these materials into our courses and on feedback and project evaluations, this paper will assess the potential of MOOCs to promote Universal Design for ICT and other professionals, while pointing up the possible trials and opportunities of such activities

The design of accessible, usable and meaningful content. Volume 1: Explanatory Essay

This Explanatory Essay discusses the 31 papers which I have authored, or made a substantial contribution to, and submitted for a PhD by Prior Publication. The Essay presents these publications in the light of their original contribution to an emerging theme of concern, Content Design, which I will argue is the deliberate design of content so that it is accessible, usable and meaningful. Content is any type of information carrying material that is produced in any medium or mixture of media, for human, as opposed to machine, consumption. As such, content has always played an important role in our lives. In the Information Age, however, the importance of this role is becoming critical. This may be attributed to many factors, including: the inexorable proliferation of digitally produced content of all types; the increased possibilities, even expectations, to interact with content; and our growing reliance upon information. Thus, there should be a renewed attention to design of content, particularly its accessibility, usability and meaningfulness. There are many research areas that deal with aspects of content. I believe that deliberate attention to the composition and structuring of content can benefit from all of these. Content Design represents a multifaceted 'problem space' that draws on a wide variety of disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences. It also has lessons to learn from traditional ways of meaning-making, particularly literary studies and rhetoric. This problem space is a place to pull together knowledge and expertise that is needed in the digital age to help to design content so that it is consumable by humans. In this Essay, my publications are situated within three strands of research that offer such knowledge and expertise: Discourse Studies; the Uses of Metadata; and the Accessibility of Content. Broadly speaking, my work contributes, within these strands, to the design of content in terms of composing, packaging and making content apprehendable

Quality control and quantification in IG/TR next-generation sequencing marker identification: protocols and bioinformatic functionalities by EuroClonality-NGS

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ARResT/Interrogate: an interactive immunoprofiler for IG/TR NGS data.

Abstract Motivation The study of immunoglobulins and T cell receptors using next-generation sequencing has finally allowed exploring immune repertoires and responses in their immense variability and complexity. Unsurprisingly, their analysis and interpretation is a highly convoluted task. Results We thus implemented ARResT/Interrogate, a web-based, interactive application. It can organize and filter large amounts of immunogenetic data by numerous criteria, calculate several relevant statistics, and present results in the form of multiple interconnected visualizations. Availability and Implementation ARResT/Interrogate is implemented primarily in R, and is freely available at http://bat.infspire.org/arrest/interrogate/ Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Quality control and quantification in IG/TR next-generation sequencing marker identification: protocols and bioinformatic functionalities by EuroClonality-NGS

Assessment of clonality, marker identification and measurement of minimal residual disease (MRD) of immunoglobulin (IG) and T cell receptor (TR) gene rearrangements in lymphoid neoplasms using next-generation sequencing (NGS) is currently under intensive development for use in clinical diagnostics. So far, however, there is a lack of suitable quality control (QC) options with regard to standardisation and quality metrics to ensure robust clinical application of such approaches. The EuroClonality-NGS Working Group has therefore established two types of QCs to accompany the NGS-based IG/TR assays. First, a central polytarget QC (cPT-QC) is used to monitor the primer performance of each of the EuroClonality multiplex NGS assays; second, a standardised human cell line-based DNA control is spiked into each patient DNA sample to work as a central in-tube QC and calibrator for MRD quantification (cIT-QC). Having integrated those two reference standards in the ARResT/Interrogate bioinformatic platform, EuroClonality-NGS provides a complete protocol for standardised IG/TR gene rearrangement analysis by NGS with high reproducibility, accuracy and precision for valid marker identification and quantification in diagnostics of lymphoid malignancies.This work was supported by Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic, grant no. 16-34272A; computational resources were provided by the CESNET LM2015042 and the CERIT Scientific Cloud LM2015085, provided under the programme “Projects of Large Research, Development, and Innovations Infrastructures”. Analyses in Prague (JT, EF and MS) were supported by Ministry of Health, Czech Republic, grant no. 00064203, and by PRIMUS/17/MED/11. Analyses in the Monza (Centro Ricerca Tettamanti, SS, AG and GC) laboratory were supported by the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) and Comitato Maria Letizia Verga

Implementing responsible innovation: the role of the meso-level(s) between project and organisation

Much of academic discussion of responsible innovation (RI) has focused on RI integration into research projects. In addition, significant attention has also been paid to RI structures and policies at the research policy and institutional level. This article reports experiences of RI implementation with a focus on the intermediate i.e. meso-level. The research described here included a series of interviews that aimed to clarify researchers' perspectives on RI as well as barriers to and benefits of RI implementation. Two cases of engagement with research projects, with the aim of promoting RI, were undertaken. The analysis of the data demonstrates the crucial contribution that the meso-level of a research programme can make in interpreting, implementing and perpetuating RI across related activities. The article provides strong evidence that the scholarly debate surrounding RI should pay more explicit attention to this meso-level, ultimately strengthening RI theory and practice

Genetic drivers in the natural history of chronic lymphocytic leukemia development as early as 16 years before diagnosis

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is preceded by monoclonal B-cell lymphocytosis (MBL), a potential CLL precursor state which can be detected in up to 17% in aged individuals. Recently, we described significant B-cell receptor immunoglobulin heavy chain (BCR IGH) gene repertoire skewing and clonotypic evolution up to 22 years before CLL diagnosis. However, pathobiological drivers during the earliest stages of MBL development remain incompletely characterized. In this study, we utilized the EuroClonality-NDC panel to sequence recurrently mutated genes in CLL in 39 peripheral blood samples from 16 CLL patients sampled up to 16 years prior to diagnosis. CLL diagnosis ranged from 5 months to 16 years after first blood sampling. Of 16 CLL patients, 8 (50%) presented with variants of interest in genes recurrently mutated in CLL such as NOTCH1, ATM, and SF3B1 . ATM variants and the IGLV3-21R110 mutation were present from the early stages of (pre)MBL development, while NOTCH1, SF3B1, and XPO1 variants arose closer to diagnosis. We additionally detected variants in FAT1 and PLCG2 as early as 10 years prior to CLL diagnosis. Overall, our data shows specific genetic drivers of CLL are associated with early and late stages of CLL development