supporting open access to teaching and learning of people with disabilities

University of PiraeusDepartment of Digital Systems

Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CE.R.T.H.) Information Technologies Institute (I.T.I.)

P. Zervas November 27, 2014

Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Education and Learning (ASK)

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Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with

DisabilitiesPanagiotis Zervas

Post Doctoral Researcher, Information Technologies Institute, Center for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece & Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece

Member of Executive Board, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning Technology

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan

Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.





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Overview of the PresentationOverview of the Presentation Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Education

and Learning (ASK) Overview of Activities Research Areas and Fields of Application Current Research Projects

Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with Disabilities Inclusive Learning Technology-enhanced Learning and Accessibility Opening up Education Inclusive Learning Portal





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Where are we?





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How does Piraeus look like?





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Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Education and Learning (ASK) – (1/2)Education and Learning (ASK) – (1/2)

A research establishment, associated with: the Department of Digital Systems at the University of

Piraeus and the Information Technologies Institute (ITI at the Center for

Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) that aims to conducts evidence-based research in

response to real-life problems for the Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Digital Systems and Services for Technology Supported Learning and Education





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Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Advanced Digital Systems and Services for Education and Learning (ASK) – (2/2)Education and Learning (ASK) – (2/2)

Founded in 2000 by Prof. Demetrios G. Sampson, Senior and Golden Member IEEE, Professor at Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Greece

Participation in 43 R&D projects attracting total external funding over 8Million Euro.

More than 330 scientific publications with at least 1477 known citations (with h-index 21) and 8 Best Paper Awards in International Conferences.

Scientific World Leadership in the field of Technology-enhanced Learning with:

Co-Editorship of the Educational Technology and Society Journal (one of the top research journals in the field based on its impact factor), Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

Co-Chairship of major international conferences on Learning Technologies, such as IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies

Active participation in International and European Centers of Excellence





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Research AreasResearch Areas Cloud Computing for Open Educational Resources and

Practices Context-Aware Adaptive and Personalized Mobile

Learning Web 2.0 and Social Computing for Learning Learning and Knowledge Analytics Digital Game and Intelligent Toy Enhanced Learning 3D Virtual Worlds in Real Education Learning Technologies for People with Disabilities





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Fields of ApplicationFields of Application

Technology-supported: Formal and Informal STEM Education

Training for People with Disabilities

Language Learning

Competence-Based Lifelong Learning





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Current Research Projects (1/2)Current Research Projects (1/2)Inspiring Science Education: Large Scale Experimentation Scenarios to Mainstream eLearning in Science, Mathematics and Technology in Primary and Secondary Schools (Funding Programme: European Commission, ICT Policy Support Programme). More info at: http://www.inspiring-science.eu/

Go-Lab: Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School (Funding Programme: European Commission, 7th Framework Programme, ICT Cooperation Programme, Technology Enhanced Learning). More info at: http://www.go-lab-project.eu/





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Current Research Projects (2/2)Current Research Projects (2/2)Open Discovery Space: A socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of eLearning Resources (Funding Programme: European Commission, ICT Policy Support Programme). More info at: http://www.opendiscoveryspace.eu/

Inclusive Learning: Supporting Trainers for an Inclusive Vocational Education and Training (Funding Programme: European Commission, Lifelong Learning Programme 2007-2013, Leonardo Da Vinci Transfer of Innovation Programme). More info at: http://www.inclusive-learning.eu/





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Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with

Disabilities





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Inclusive LearningInclusive Learning Several frameworks have been developed such as:

Universal Design for Learning (Rose & Meyer, 2002)

Differentiated Learning (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006)

All recognize the broad diversity of learners with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference and they provide specific learning design principles to ensure accessibility of all learner types to the learning environment or education delivery.

Rose, D.H., & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal design for learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Tomlinson, C. A. & McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction and understanding by design: Connecting content and kids. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.





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Accessibility recognized as a key design consideration for TeL systems ensuring that learners with diverse needs and preferences can access technology-supported resources, services and experiences in general (Seale & Cooper, 2009)

“Learners experience a disability when there is a mismatch between the learner’s needs (or preferences) and the education or learning experience delivered” (IMS GLC, 2004)

“Accessibility is the ability of the learning environment to adjust to the needs and preferences of each learner (IMS GLC, 2004)

Technology-Enhanced Learning (TeL) and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TeL) and Accessibility (1/2)Accessibility (1/2)

IMS Global Learning Consortium (GLC). (2004). IMS AccessForAll Meta-Data Overview. Retrieved October 30, 2013 from: http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/accmdv1p0/imsaccmd_oviewv1p0.html

Seale, J. & Cooper, M. (2009). E-Learning and accessibility: An exploration of the potential role of generic pedagogical tools. Computers & Education, 54(4), 1107-1116.





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ISO/IEC 24751-1:2008 “Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in e-Learning, Education and Training” is intended to meet the needs of learners with disabilities and anyone in a disabling context. ISO/IEC 24751-1:2008 provides a common framework to describe and specify learner needs and preferences on the one hand and the corresponding description of the digital learning resources on the other hand, so that individual learner preferences and needs can be matched with the appropriate user interface tools and digital learning resources.

ISO/IEC Standard has been influenced by IMS Access for ALL specifications: IMS Accessibility for Learner Information Package (IMS AccLIP) IMS Accessibility Metadata Description

Technology-Enhanced Learning (TeL) and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TeL) and Accessibility (2/2)Accessibility (2/2)

ISO IEC JTC1/SC36 24751-1:2008. “Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in e-Learning, Education and Training.” Available online at: http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=41521





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Opening up EducationOpening up Education Global movement that aims to facilitate open and flexible learning by

exploring the potential of digital technologies in providing enhanced learning experiences (Conole, 2013)

Open Access to:

Educational resources (OERs) / practices (OEPs)

Tools, services and people

Via multiple devices

Desktop and laptops

Mobile devices

Cloud Technologies and Cloud Infrastructures

Conole, G. (2013). Open Educational Resources. In Designing for Learning in an Open World (pp. 225-243). Springer New York.





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Opening Up Education - Aspects of Opening Up Education - Aspects of OpennessOpenness

Open Curriculum: learners can mix educational resources for different disciplines to meet their needs. This places learners in charge of their own learning.

Open Learning: teachers, experts and/or peers can share new ideas and new understanding during the learning process.

Open Assessment: instead of formal evaluation of learning results, previously led by accredited education providers, assessment of what learners have learned can be carried out by their teachers, others and peers during the learning process via peer to peer or crowd-sourced assessment with on-demand accreditation for learners.

Open Platform: cloud–based provision and the use of open standards make it easier for different platforms and services to exchange information and data

European Commission (2011). Public consultation on opening up education - a proposal for a European initiative. Directorate-General for Education for Culture. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/documents/consult/open_en.pdf





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The Inclusive Learning Portal

(http://www.inclusive-learning.eu/)





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Inclusive Learning PortalInclusive Learning PortalOverviewOverview

Includes accessible OERs in two aggregation levels:

Accessible educational resources : digital materials such as video and audio lectures (podcasts), references and readings, workbooks and textbooks that conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Accessible Training Courses: sequences of learning activities, which include accessible educational resources, tools and services. They follow a specific pedagogical strategy, which is suitable for disabled people training, and they are conducted entirely online targeting specific educational objectives.

Two main types of portal users:

Teachers of people with disabilities: they are the main recipient of the functionality offered by the Inclusive Learning Portal

Learners with disabilities: they are using only a limited set of the Inclusive Learning Portal services. More specifically, they can enroll to accessible training courses offered by their teachers





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Inclusive Learning PortalInclusive Learning PortalFunctional Requirements (1/2)Functional Requirements (1/2)

User profiling: teachers should be able to create their profile and access a dashboard with the activities that they have performed.

Uploading Accessible OERs: Teachers should be able to upload and store accessible OERs to the portal by describing them with appropriate metadata.

Authoring Accessible OERs: Teachers should be able to use authoring tools for developing accessible OERs in the form of accessible training courses.

Annotating Accessible OERs: Teachers should be able to rate, comment, tag and bookmark accessible OERs. These annotations are expected to be used by other teachers for assessing the quality of the accessible OERs during searching.

Searching Accessible OERs: Teachers should be able to search for accessible OERs across existing repositories by either using formal metadata added by the authors of these OERs e.g. grade level, subject domain, disability type etc., or by using social metadata added by the users of the OERs (namely, the teachers) such as social tags and ratings.





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Inclusive Learning PortalInclusive Learning PortalFunctional Requirements (2/2)Functional Requirements (2/2)

Delivering Accessible OERs: Teachers should be able to organize and deliver their own accessible training courses to their learners. Learners should able also to enroll to these courses.

Communicating with users: Proper tools should be made available to the teachers for communicating and collaborating with other colleagues in order to exchange ideas and best teaching practices.

Participating to training academies: teachers should have access to training academies that offer them training opportunities towards enhancing their competences about inclusive learning and accessibility.





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TILE, Canada EPKhas, Malaysia

KlasCement, Belgium

TESConnect, UK LALIDC, USA

Existing Portals Supporting Open Access To Existing Portals Supporting Open Access To Teaching and Learning of People With Disabilities Teaching and Learning of People With Disabilities





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Features TILE EPKhas TESConnect LALIDC KlasCement

User profiling

Uploading Accessible LOs

Authoring Accessible LOs

Annotating Accessible LOs

Searching Accessible LOs

Delivering Accessible LOs

Communicating with users

Participating to training academies

Comparing Features of Existing Portals Comparing Features of Existing Portals





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal ArchitectureArchitecture





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Metadata HarvesterMetadata Harvester

Collects educational metadata from the external repositories. It includes four sub-components

Harvester: harvests metadata records from external repositories. Based on Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). All metadata is based on the IEEE LOM standard and it has been tailored specifically to support the classification of OERs based on their accessibility characteristics.

Validator: validates the metadata records that are harvested by the harvester, so as to ensure that they conform to the Inclusive Learning AP.

Link checking: it is used in order to verify that the metadata record includes a valid URL to the respective OER of the external repository. If the URL doesn’t work, then the metadata record is excluded from the harvesting process.

Metadata Checking: it performs completeness check of the metadata records that are harvested based on the Inclusive Learning AP. If incomplete metadata records exist, then they are flagged, so as to be enriched in the future by appropriate Inclusive Learning Portal users.





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Search OERs MechanismSearch OERs Mechanism

Facilitates teachers in searching for accessible OERs by following different approaches such as:

simple keyword search: using keywords and combinations.

facetted search: the teacher is able to qualify the keyword search with several additional facets such as the OER type, the disability type etc.

social tagging search: the teacher is presented with the most popular tags contributed by the Inclusive Learning Portal’s teachers, visualized by a tag cloud. A tag links to the respective accessible OER(s).





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Metadata Authoring ToolMetadata Authoring Tool

Enables teachers to characterize their own accessible OERs with educational metadata (following the IEEE LOM) and upload them to the Portal.

This tool is also used by the Inclusive Learning Portal users to edit and enrich the metadata of accessible OERs that are harvested by the external repositories.





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Online Learning HandbookOnline Learning Handbook

Provides the teachers with specific learning design principles to ensure that teaching practices can accommodate all types of students.

It also aims to assist teachers in developing engaging and motivating learning experiences for all learners, regardless of their special abilities and preferences.

It provides guidelines for developing accessible OERs, as well as examples for restricting or eliminating non accessible elements

It can be customized with different display preferences





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Course Management System (1/2)Course Management System (1/2)

It has been integrated to Inclusive Learning portal via Single-Sign-On functionality

Enables teachers to design accessible training courses and deliver them to their.

Teachers are also able to participate in teacher training courses that will facilitate them in enhancing their competences in process of designing and developing accessible OERs

It is based on ATutor, which is built around IMS Access For All Specifications





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The Inclusive Learning Portal The Inclusive Learning Portal Course Management System (2/2)Course Management System (2/2)

The design and development of accessible training courses in ATutor is supported by TinyMCE (a web content authoring tool).

TinyMCE has been adapted in order to provide with better support when teachers are developing accessible OERs, by following the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

TinyMCE integrates a plugin, which uses the Achecker automatic validation results





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Join our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)Join our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Title: “Designing and Developing Inclusive Learning”

Duration: 4 Weeks (1/9/2014 – 27/9/2014)

Training Modules:

Introduction and Tools

Inclusive Learning and Teaching

Universal Design for Learning

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Accessible content for OER

Validating accessible content for OER

Register at: http://www.inclusive-learning.eu/mooc





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Conclusions - Future WorkConclusions - Future Work The issue of accessibility in Technology-enhanced Learning is too important

to be ignored.

Therefore, it is important to empower the teachers with appropriate tools and services towards supporting accessible Technology-enhanced Learning

Inclusive Learning Portal aims to support this and provides tools and services for facilitating the main stages of a typical e-Learning chain, namely, creation, publication, discovery, acquisition, access, use, re-use and delivery of OERs. It also provides teacher training opportunities regarding several aspects of inclusive learning and accessibility.

Future work includes further development of the Inclusive Learning Portal in order to support latest developments of accessibility metadata in Schema.org.





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P. Zervas, V. Kardaras, S. Baldiris Navarro, J. Bacca, C. Avila, Y. Politis, Deveril, J. Treviranus, R. Fabregat, L. Goodman and D. Sampson, "Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with Disabilities", in D. Sampson, D. Ifenthaler, J. M. Spector and P. Isaias, (Eds.), Digital Systems for Open Access to Formal and Informal Learning, Springer, ISBN 978-3-319-02263-5, Chapter 5, pp 58-68, September 2014

P. Zervas, V. Kardaras and D. Sampson, "An Online Educational Portal for Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with Disabilities", In Proc. of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2014), Athens, Greece, IEEE Computer Society, 7-10, July 2014

D. Sampson and P. Zervas, "Supporting Accessible Technology-Enhanced Training: The eAccess2Learn Framework", IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT) (ISSN 1939-1382), vol. 4(4), pp. 353-364, IEEE Computer Society, October 2011

D. Sampson and P. Zervas, "Technology-enhanced Training for People with Disabilities: The eAccess2Learn Framework", in Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS 2010), Thessaloniki, Greece, IEEE Computer Society, (ISBN: 978-0-7695-4278-2/10), (BEST PAPER AWARD), 24-26, November 2010

D. Sampson and P. Zervas, "Technology-enhanced Training for All: Evaluation Results from the use of the e-Access2Learn Framework", in Proc. of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2010), Sousse, Tunisia, IEEE Computer Society (ISBN: 978-0-7695-4055-9), 5-7, July 2010

Related PublicationsRelated Publications





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