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of use, and all of them entail modelling activities
focused on adaptive and personalized processes.
In line with the functional diversity paradigm
(Ondeck, 2003) that we fully subscribe, some
relevant stakeholders (e.g. ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36)
consider that learners experience a disability when
there is a mismatch between the learner's needs
(or preferences) and the education or learning
experience delivered. Disability is thus not viewed
as a personal trait, but as a consequence of the
relationship between a learner and a learning
environment or resource delivery system. While
pursuing accessibility, providers of e-learning
services should adapt learning objects to both
personal circumstances and context.
Moreover, human factors should be addressed
in every stage of any ICT service life-cycle. Ac-
cording to the user centered design methodologies
(see Background section for references), targeted
users and contexts of use should be considered
at the research stage together with ethnographic,
social and cultural issues. This would lead to the
definition of a set of user requirements, and then
to learning systems with built-in capabilities in
order to provide a good user experience. Evalua-
tion should be conducted within each individual
service component at the design, development and
delivery stages, with the evaluation results feeding
back into these stages. In addition to evaluating
each component, the overall service should also
be evaluated in order to ensure it meets the ap-
plicable user requirements.
The adoption of specific design and evaluation
processes, where human factors are addressed, will
enable to detect and solve deficiencies in time,
increasing the quality of services. The ISO standard
13407:1999 'Human-centered design processes
for interactive systems' provides guidance on
human centered design activities throughout the
life cycle of computer-based interactive systems.
The standard is targeted to people who manage
design processes. According to the standard, hu-
man centered design consists of four different
types of design activities:
•
To understand and specify the context of
use.
•
To specify the user and organizational
requirements.
•
To produce draft design solutions.
•
To evaluate design against requirements.
In the learning domain, learner centered de-
sign means designing for the specific needs of a
learner. Along this line, the design of an educa-
tional system should focus on how people learn
(learner's characteristics) and how learning can
be facilitated (according to system functionalities
and resources).
Instructional design aims at setting educational
objectives for the system, and designing the inter-
action with the system in order to achieve 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.
Adaptation is essential in any e-learning envi-
ronment since learning is, by nature, an evolving
process that strongly depends on users' character-
istics and their evolution over time. In particular,
e-learning users have a wide variety of abilities,
backgrounds, interests, level of experience on
the use of resources, etc. Therefore, there is a
need for a general framework to provide learning
autonomy for disabled students in HE based on
adaptive environments that support standards that
cover the full life cycle of service adaptation in
LLL, and accommodate the existing and future
services available in HE institutions.
A GENERAL FRAMEWORK TO
PROVIDE LEARNING AUTONOMY
FOR DISABLED STUDENTS
IN HIGHER EDUCATION
The chapter presents a general framework to allow
the full participation of disabled students in the
learning process. This approach follows the life
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