Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
and personalization features that offer dynamic
contextual recommendations during the course
execution.
In this chapter, we present this framework and
illustrate its application in the EU4ALL project,
where we concentrate on a scenario at UNED and
comment on components that are on the focus of
our research.
The chapter will be structured as follows. The
next section introduces the background and the
motivation to support functional diversity issues
in the context of the LLL paradigm and presents
how technologies can turn into both a barrier and/
or an opportunity, depending on the way they are
applied. Universities cannot be left aside to these
needs, but they are much involved in the process.
The approach proposed to accommodate these
needs in their technological infrastructure will
be outlined in the background section.
The third section focuses on the personalized
features to be provided in LLL scenarios in order
to cope with the teaching and learning process
in an inclusive way. This is achieved by taking
into account that all the services to be delivered
are strongly dependent on the management of
individual and group profiles and their relation-
ships with contents and context of use. Besides,
all of them entail modelling activities focused on
adaptive and personalized processes. Instructional
design issues are also relevant at setting the educa-
tional objectives of the system, and designing the
interaction in a way that facilitates achieving those
objectives. This implies learner's requirements
being met, which means incorporating scaffold-
ing into the context, tasks, tools, and interface of
software learning environments.
The fourth section presents a general frame-
work to leverage learning autonomy for disabled
students at HE. It introduces the general framework
that allows the full participation of disabled stu-
dents in the learning process, and describes mainly
those components where our research group has
been working on. The technology focuses on
attending the learning needs of the students in a
Technology should support the needs of Higher
Education (HE) institutions and individuals for
autonomous and dynamic creation of Lifelong
Learning (LLL) communities and of new dis-
tributed e-learning services. The chapter intro-
duces some key issues of a general framework
to support the full participation of students with
functional diversity issues (i.e. disabilities) in the
learning process by covering the full life cycle of
service adaptation at HE. This support is achieved
combining a twofold approach. On the one hand,
universal design approaches that are based on
standards and specifications that try to cover the
wide range of possible needs are used. On the
other hand, personalization techniques draw on
dynamic contextual recommendations, which are
applied during the course execution. The approach
is designed for HE institutions, which are required
to integrate this inclusive support into their exist-
ing services infrastructure.
The objective of this chapter is not to present
how much accessible a Learning Management
System (LMS) can be or how to build yet another
LMS that is more accessible than the existing ones.
The objective of this chapter goes far beyond LMS
with a focus on describing a general framework
that can be applied into HE to facilitate the learn-
ing autonomy of their students, including those
with disabilities. This framework should accom-
modate existing and future services available to
the institution members (i.e. students, faculty,
administrative staff) in an intelligent web-based
environment; it guarantees support and extend-
ibility making a pervasive use of educational
standards. The framework is required to develop
the full life cycle of service adaptation, which
is, by nature, a step-wise process where differ-
ent roles and needs (i.e. course designers, tutors
and learners) should be supported. The approach
draws on combining universal design, modelling
techniques following standards and specifications
that try to cover the wide variety of user needs,
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