Universal Design Engineering

Many teachers, administrators, professors, content developers, and publishers espouse a personal commitment to the principles of universal design for learning, yet, there is little evidence that they can design interventions that enhance accessibility or meaningful engagement in learning. In this paper the authors argue that the field can readily be advanced through the application of engineering models. A universal design engineering model known as Design for More Types will be introduced, including a taxonomy of specific design interventions that can be implemented to enhance the accessibility and usability of educational materials. Nine case studies will be presented to assist developers, researchers, and practitioners in operationalizing universal design concepts into active ingredients that can be carefully defined, measured, and evaluated

Inclusive Technologies: Assistive Technology for All Learners

Edukacja to inwestycja, którą czyni społeczeństwo w każde nowe pokolenie dzieci i młodzieży. Biorąc pod uwagę przyszłość, która może nie wyglądać jak przeszłość, jak możemy ocenić cel edukacji? Mówiąc słowami Aoun (2017), chodzi o odpowiedź na pytanie: jak opracować program nauczania przygotowujący uczniów do funkcjonowania w przyszłości, w której ludzie i roboty będą wykonywać pracę? Celem tego artykułu jest opisanie koncepcji technologii wspomagającej i prześledzenie jej transformacji w stronę zwiększania skuteczności uczenia się, wspomaganej przez technologię jako sposobu wspierania sukcesu edukacyjnego wszystkich uczniów. Przedstawione propozycje odnoszą się do uczniów we wszystkich klasach i mają za zadanie wspieranie ich w sprostaniu wysokim standardom związanym z czytaniem, pisaniem i rozwiązywaniem problemów matematycznych.Education is the investment a society makes in each new generation of children and youth. Given a future that may not look like the past, how do we re-assess the purpose of education? In the words of Aoun (2017), how do we robot-proof our curriculum in order to prepare students for a future where humans and robots will complete for jobs? The purpose of this article is to describe the concept of assistive technology and explore its transformation to technology-enhanced performance as a means of supporting the educational productivity of all learners. Examples are provided to help diverse learners in every classroom as they seek to meet high academic standards relative to executive functioning, reading, writing, and solving mathematical problems

An Evaluation of the Information Retrieval Skills of Students With and Without Learning Handicaps Using Printed and Electronic Encyclopedias

270 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.The use of online databases for information retrieval has risen substantially in recent years as a result of issues associated with accessibility, convenience, and efficiency. This study examined student use of information technology and focused specifically on students' natural information retrieval skills by (a) comparing student use of printed and electronic forms of an encyclopedia, (b) examining the effects of menu or command driven interfaces and task difficulty on students' success of retrieval of specific factual information using encyclopedias, and (c) assessing students' attitudes toward information retrieval tasks when using printed and electronic encyclopedias.Thirteen junior high students with learning handicaps and fifteen students without learning handicaps were randomly selected and randomly assigned to one of three treatment orders in a repeated measures Latin square design. Assessments were made on each student's IQ, spelling ability, reference skills, and keyboarding speed. Each treatment session involved retrieving specific factual information on four search tasks using one of three encyclopedias: print, electronic with menus, or electronic with commands. Students completed an attitude scale at the end of every search session.Significant differences were found between the two groups' levels of success on all retrieval tasks. The menu driven electronic encyclopedia was found to improve retrieval success significantly over the command driven version. However, the menu electronic encyclopedia was not found to improve retrieval success significantly over the printed encyclopedia. Further, the command driven encyclopedia significantly impaired retrieval success to a level lower than that in the printed encyclopedia. Significantly greater retrieval success was also found on assigned tasks versus self-selected tasks and on simple tasks versus complex tasks. Regression analysis indicated that scores from the reference skills test and keyboarding speed were significant predictors of retrieval success, whereas IQ and spelling ability were not. Students' attitudes toward information retrieval tasks were not affected by the type of encyclopedia used, but students with learning handicaps were found to hold significantly higher (positive) attitudes than their nonhandicapped peers after all three treatments. The implications of the results for teaching online searching to students are noted.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Academic domains as political battlegrounds : A global enquiry by 99 academics in the fields of education and technology

Academic cognition and intelligence are ‘socially distributed’; instead of dwelling inside the single mind of an individual academic or a few academics, they are spread throughout the different minds of all academics. In this article, some mechanisms have been developed that systematically bring together these fragmented pieces of cognition and intelligence. These mechanisms jointly form a new authoring method called ‘crowd-authoring’, enabling an international crowd of academics to co-author a manuscript in an organized way. The article discusses this method, addressing the following question: What are the main mechanisms needed for a large collection of academics to collaborate on the authorship of an article? This question is addressed through a developmental endeavour wherein 101 academics of educational technology from around the world worked together in three rounds by email to compose a short article. Based on this endeavour, four mechanisms have been developed: a) a mechanism for finding a crowd of scholars; b) a mechanism for managing this crowd; c) a mechanism for analyzing the input of this crowd; and d) a scenario for software that helps automate the process of crowd-authoring. The recommendation is that crowd-authoring ought to win the attention of academic communities and funding agencies, because, given the well-connected nature of the contemporary age, the widely and commonly distributed status of academic intelligence and the increasing value of collective and democratic participation, large-scale multi-authored publications are the way forward for academic fields and wider academia in the 21st century.peerReviewe

Academic domains as political battlegrounds:A global enquiry by 99 academics in the fields of education and technology

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain. For more information about the authorship approach, please see Al Lily AEA (2015) A crowd-authoring project on the scholarship of educational technology. Information Development. doi: 10.1177/0266666915622044.</p