IMPROVING DESIGN OF E-LEARNING COURSES

TO MEET SPECIAL NEEDS

Ileana Hamburg

Institute for Work and Technology, Munscheidstr. 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen, Germany

Thorsten Busse

Institute for Work and Technology, Munscheidstr. 14, 45886 Gelsenkirchen, Germany

Keywords: Web-based e-Learning for disabled, Scenario planning, Special needs, Special education.

Abstract: Web-based e-Learning could provide additional educational opportunities for disabled people to improve

their qualification and to support their social integration especially into the knowledge-based economy.

However, the requirements and wishes of disabled people are frequently not understood or taken into ac-

count by the designers of learning environments based on new media. Often, the users can not articulate

their wishes about the learning environments and what they would like to learn for their future. In this paper

scenario planning is presented as a method to help disabled people to express their wishes and plan their ca-

reers. Designers too, are addressed to increase their awareness about special needs of disabled people to im-

prove the usability and accessibility of Web-based e-Learning. Examples of on-going projects are shortly

presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

The use of the Internet is growing worldwide at a

rapid rate. Its technologies in particular Web-based

services have the potential to revolutionise ap-

proaches to learning (online, e-Learning). There has

been a rise in the availability of e-Learning educa-

tion and training programmes and complementing

this growth, the popularity of online education is

increasing.

The potential of new technologies particularly

the Web should be used in a way that both students

and staff have benefits. Additionally, learning op-

tions available for students should increase, rather

than using e-Learning as a cut-price approach that

leads to a reduction in quality. These new forms of

learning could provide additional educational oppor-

tunities for disabled people to support their social

integration and integration into the knowledge-based

economy. However, people with disabilities are

among the least considered in the context of online

learning (Kinash et al. 2004). This is particularly

disconcerting, because estimated 10% of students

are disabled in the European Community (Paciello

2000) and even estimated 13% in Germany (Ham-

burg et al. 2002). Estimated 60% of disabled stu-

dents in the UK are dyslexic, though the representa-

tion in the general population is much smaller. This

indicates the continuing barriers to further and

higher education encountered by other groups of

disabled people. In conclusion, in most countries a

substantial subset of the total population is poten-

tially excluded from full advantages of the Internet

and online education.

There exist guidelines that outline means for ac-

commodating individuals with special needs into

online courses. However, many courses still contain

barriers for this population (Burgstahler 2004).

e-Learning tends to use technologies and ap-

proaches developed in other contexts, such as in the

industry, which are not necessarily appropriate for e-

Learning applications for people with disabilities.

There is still a general lack of awareness of the need

for accessible Web-based design, although there

exist web accessibility guidelines produced by the

World Wide Web Consortium (see chapter two)

(Hersh et al. 2004).

There are concerns that increasing the accessibil-

ity for disabled will erode academic standards

(Wagner, 1989). Such concerns are largely based on

357

Hamburg I. and Busse T. (2006).

IMPROVING DESIGN OF E-LEARNING COURSES TO MEET SPECIAL NEEDS.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and

e-Government / e-Learning, pages 357-362

DOI: 10.5220/0001241503570362

 SciTePress

misunderstandings and ignorance of the importance

of and requirements for accessibility, as well as the

types of measures that will result in accessible learn-

ing environments (Gosden and Hampton 2000).

However, increasing accessibility is likely to lead to

benefits for all students, including non-disabled

students. It is unlikely to have any deleterious effects

on quality or academic standards (Hamburg et al.

2005; Muscan et al. 2004).

Some teachers consider that accessibility is un-

necessary due to the very small numbers of disabled

students. However, inaccessibility of courses, build-

ings and other facilities are one of the reasons for the

continuing under representation of disabled people

in further and higher education.

The requirements and wishes of disabled people

are frequently not understood or taken into account

by the developers of learning environments based on

new media (Hamburg et al. 2003). Many designers

believe erroneously that assistive technologies alone

can remove all access barriers.

Often the users can not articulate their wishes

about the learning environments and what they

would like to learn for their future.

In this paper the scenario planning is presented

as one method to help disabled people to express

their wishes and to plan their careers on one hand.

On the other hand scenario planning is meant to

support designers in decision making which ad-

dresses the special needs of disabled people at

e-Learning courses to improve usability and accessi-

bility. It is intended to anticipate potential problems

before any code or HTML is written at all.

e-Learning in our understanding is "… the use of

new multimedia technologies and the Internet to

improve the quality of learning by facilitating access

to resources and services as well as remote ex-

changes and collaboration." (White Paper, 2003).

2 E-LEARNING COURSES TO

MEET SPECIAL NEEDS

Distance learning courses and environments that are

Internet and Web-based (e-Learning) can be used to

apply the potential of the Internet. Other information

and communications technologies too, can support

education and training of disabled people through:

• Facilitating needs-oriented learning by providing

tools for searching information and learning con-

tent in the Internet which corresponds both to the

learning topic and to the learning situation of the

student.

• Usage in the context of action-oriented learning,

with the further aim of obtaining Internet skills.

• Supporting a searching and exploring process

with the learner as focal point and the trainer or

tutor in a support role. Furthermore, to provide a

loose framework in which learning is carried out.

• The provision of additional functions, such as

computer-supported acquisition, distribution and

creation of knowledge as well as collaborative

learning.

The subject of open Web-based e-Learning has

engaged researchers world-wide for a number of

years and different approaches have been proposed

for Internet-based distance learning. Methods for

synchronous learning (Eschelbeck 1995; Boegh

et al. 1998), asynchronous learning (McDaid et al.

1999), as well as environments to cover communica-

tion needs of collaborative work in a learning envi-

ronment (Mcgreal 1998) were proposed.

e-Learning techniques can either be the sole (or

main) teaching approach or supplementary to tradi-

tional courses. There are advantages of using them

in addition to traditional courses, because this allows

students to examine material from different view

points and/or to choose the learning approach that

they prefer. The opportunity to study material in

different ways generally increases understanding and

learning. In addition, the combination of

e-Learning and traditional classes gives students

who can not attend particular classes the opportunity

to complement missed study material. This can be

principally beneficial to those groups of disabled

students, which prefer to work at home. There is

anecdotal evidence that many disabled students

prefer to work at home. This is of course dependent

on the student’s access to the Web and the material

which is available on the Web in an appropriate

format.

Making the best use of the medium to encourage

student interests and active learning requires appro-

priate teaching approaches. It is not effective to

simply place a set of notes on the Web or transmit a

traditional lecture across a video (or audio link).

Therefore, teaching staff will require training and

access to suitable materials that are more appropriate

for the new media. Web-based and other learning

materials too, need to be updated just as frequently

as materials used in traditional classrooms.

Unless e-Learning environments are not well de-

signed, they can increase, rather than overcome

social isolation. Individual learning without interac-

tion with other students and teachers will be the

reason. However, learning paradigms based on

"networked learning", that is learning in a learning

WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING

358

community and/or "blended learning" i.e. an appro-

priate mix of e-learning and traditional class-room

tuition can be used to overcome this disadvantage.

Studies show that there is an endless list of de-

sign elements of e-Learning courses conflicting

themselves due to imposing barriers and at the same

time providing support for students with special

needs. To create a manageable list, it is necessary to

focus on elements which affect the student to par-

ticipate fully in e-Learning courses.

Results of a literature review and of discussions

with disabled people were that the main factors for

the design of Web-based courses can be grouped in

five categories: Focus on disabilities, Design of the

Web-site, Applied Technology, Instructional Meth-

odologies and Support Systems. These will also

constitute the descriptors for our scenarios (see next

part) and are complex elements.

When focussing on disabilities it needs to be

considered that specific elements addressing differ-

ent disabilities must be present. In this essay as an

example visual and hearing impairments are consid-

ered.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) de-

fines standards and gives recommendations of what

a good and informative Web-site is. The accessibil-

ity of Web-sites for disabled persons was especially

taken into account. The chapter titles of the

‘Guidelines Web Content’(W3C 1999) are:

1. Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and

visual content

2. Don't rely on colour alone

3. Use markup and style sheets and do so properly

4. Clarify natural language usage

5. Create tables that transform gracefully

6. Ensure that pages featuring new technologies

transform gracefully

7. Ensure user control of time-sensitive content

changes

8. Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user

interfaces

9. Design for device-independence

10. Use interim solutions

11. Use W3C technologies and guidelines

12. Provide context and orientation information.

13. Provide clear navigation mechanisms

14. Ensure that documents are clear and simple.

These guidelines provide a good first idea about

what is necessary in the category Design of the

Web-site to ensure good accessibility.

When reffering to Applied Technology, it

becomes obvious that additional technologies

(cameras, video conferencing systems, chat rooms,

screan readers, etc) pose barriers for individuals with

special needs.

Furthermore, it is important to consider that both

Web-based and non-Web-based technologies are

necessary to guarnatee an efficient participation in

an e-Learning course.

The category Instructional Methodology reffers

to assigned activities during the learning sessions,

communication, timing requiremenst, and curricular

content.

Support Systems include internal support

(content sensitive help) as well as external support

coming from other persons than the course’s teacher.

In the following we describe shortly the scenario

method used in our projects.

3 SCENARIOS

Scenarios are "narrative descriptions of assumptions,

risks and environmental factors and how they may

affect operations. Scenarios attempt to explore the

effect of changing several variables at once with

objective analysis and subjective interpretations"

(Wikipedia 2005).

"Scenarios are narratives of alternative environ-

ments in which today’s decisions may be played out.

They are not predictions. Nor are they strategies"

(Ogilvy

and Schwartz 2004).

Scenario planning derives from the observation

of the given impossibility of knowing precisely how

the future will play out. A good decision or strategy

adopted is the one that plays out well across several

possible futures. To find that "robust" strategy, a

variety of scenarios are created in a way that each

scenario diverges markedly from the other. These

sets of scenarios are essentially constructed stories

about the future. Each of the scenarios is modelling

a distinct, plausible world in which we might some-

day have to live and work.

To be an effective planning tool, scenarios

should be written in a form of absorbing and con-

vincing stories that describe a broad range of alter-

native futures. Scenario planning can contain ele-

ments that are difficult to formalise such as subjec-

tive interpretations of facts, shifts in values, new

regulations or inventions. It is important for scenar-

ios to include plausible, but unexpectedly important

situations and problems that already exist in small

scales in the present.

Some steps in the planning of scenarios are as in

the following (Wikipedia 2005):

• Decide on the key question to be answered by

the analysis

IMPROVING DESIGN OF E-LEARNING COURSES TO MEET SPECIAL NEEDS

359

• Set the time and scope of the analysis

• Identify major stakeholders

• Identify main descriptors (factors of influence or

driving forces)

• Identify the extremes of the possible outcomes of

the (two) driving forces and check the dimen-

sions for consistency and plausibility

• Define and write out scenarios

• Assess the scenarios. Are they relevant for the

goal? Are the internally consistent?

• Identify research needs and develop quantitative

methods

• Converge towards decision scenarios

4 EXAMPLES OF SCENARIOS

WITHIN EUROPEAN

PROJECTS

In the following two projects scenarios in which the

authors are involved, were developed about people

with different kinds of disabilities using Web-based

e-Learning modules.

A project within the GRUNDTVIG programme

of the European Commission is the project IECU-

VADVLA (Hamburg et al. 2005). IECUVADVLA

means “Improvement of Employment Chances of

the Unemployed and the Visual and Auditive Dis-

abled by Innovative Applications”. IECUVADVLA

was initiated in the context of a participatory learn-

ing partnership of five countries: Romania, Ger-

many, Hungary, England and the Netherlands. In-

vestigations of the existing situation in the partici-

pating countries were already carried out. These are,

concerning the educational assistance by electronic

means, that especially senior disabled often have

moderate levels of education. In the current phase of

the project, informative assistance will be provided

based on the results of the investigations. Further-

more, some specific Web-based e-Learning courses

will be designed in order to improve computer skills,

the employment application techniques of the target

groups, and the awareness and knowledge about the

target group’s rights.

Scenarios are also used in the European project

TYAEST. Within this project alternative education

models for young adult education, particularly for

young disabled adults, were developed to increase

“consumption” of education. Furthermore, it pro-

vides an alternative perspective upon continuous

education and enables the planning of careers.

It was planned to disseminate and analyse the

scenarios within a workshop held together with

disabled young people at a special school in Ger-

many.

One of the goals of this project is to use scenar-

ios to determine patterns of interaction of a disabled

person in a Web-based e-Learning course. Addition-

ally, functions protecting the software from irre-

versible actions of users need to be developed, for

instance “warning”-alerts need to pop-up. Another

goal is to motivate users to achieve Web-

competence and to facilitate the planning of their

future. The chosen scenario approach in the projects

is slightly different from the traditional use of the

scenario technique. Scenario technique is conven-

tionally used either as a teaching method in educa-

tional systems, or as a planning tool in business or

politics. The scenarios developed and used in the

projects IECUVADVLA and TYAEST combine the

teaching and the planning aspects. They are to gen-

erate benefits for students, for developers of special-

ised e-Learning applications, and to increase knowl-

edge about e-Learning applications for disabled

people even at political decision-making levels. In

literature a lot of learning scenarios for disabled can

be found. However, the literature mainly targets the

group of developers of e-Learning applications and

is mostly provided by scientists or university stu-

dents (Florénn

and Lindén 2003). The DEMOS pro-

ject in England examined learning needs of disabled

persons by interviewing them (for more information

about the project: http://jarmin.com/demos/project/

index.html). In IECUVADVLA and TYAEST it is

intended to develop the scenarios in intensive coop-

eration with the affected group. The demands and

wishes of disabled learners will be linked together

with experiences and knowledge of scientists and

developers of learning applications. Even if aspects

of usability and accessibility are already taken into

account in nowadays e-Learning programs, it is

important to respect the learners’ wishes. To intro-

duce the scenario technique a "dummy scenario" has

been presented to the students from the special

school in Bochum during the first workshop.

Klaus is a 16 year old boy visiting the 10

grade.

His hobbies are swimming, reading and computer

gaming. So far he is an ordinary teenager but he has

got a handicap, he is blind. At the age of three he

drunk antifreeze (smelled like citron) which contains

methyl alcohol and for the reason his eyesight is

completely gone. Nevertheless he has plans for his

vocational future. In former times a blind person had

very few possibilities for working, best known pro-

fessions were piano tuner or beggar. In nowadays

handicapped people have more opportunities. Klaus

is interested in working as a clerk in an office. For-

WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING

360

tunately most of the work in an office is done with

computers. In school he is trained to use a Braille-

device and a speech output device for reading the

screen contents. Therefore he is able to cope with

most of the work as well as a seeing person. To

improve his skills and his employability he wants to

learn building up a Web-homepage. Therefore he

attends an

e-Learning course for HTML and homepage design

especially developed for blind users. He found this

course by visiting an online portal for blind users.

This course is adjusted to the needs of blind users in

different ways. It is HTML based and needs no fur-

ther software but a standard browser e.g. Firefox or

Microsoft Internet Explorer. The course works with-

out video clips or flash animations so neither the

screen reader nor the Braille-output device has prob-

lems to present the content of the e-Learning plat-

form in a suitable way. To raise accessibility the

platform is set up in a simple way and all learning

modules have the same structure. The course is sup-

plied by specially trained and certified e-Learning-

trainers which communicate with the learners via e-

mail, phone, chat, forums or online conferences.

The animated scenario was presented to the stu-

dents with different disabilities of this special school

in Bochum Germany. Questions about plausibility

and consequences of it have been discussed. Some

students express that the scenario could help them to

think more positive about learning and future ca-

reers.

The students like scenario methods and want to

work themselves in groups to develop other new

scenarios. The topics they proposed were about

using Web for learning by: visually impaired users

with hand tremor, users with dyslexia, deaf or hear-

ing impaired, user with colour blindness. The key

Question for the scenarios is “how the Web can

make some e-learning tasks easier for people with

disabilities”. The two main factors of influence are

the type of disability and the technology used.

In the next workshops these scenarios will be

presented and discussed. They will be analysed in

connection with their consistency and relevance for

the target group. Strategies for lifelong learning will

be developed together with the students in this con-

text. From the previous discussions with the students

it could be concluded that the students do not under-

stand what means and how important is lifelong

learning for their integration into social and working

life.

It is intended to find patterns of interaction of a

disabled person in a Web-based e-Learning course.

Two developers of e-learning environments will be

invited to the workshops. The will try to make some

adaptations at the Web-based learning environment

developed within the past Leonardo project EURO

H about distance learning for people with disabilities

(Hamburg et al. 2004).

Additionally, functions protecting the software

from irreversible actions of users will be developed,

for instance “warning”-alerts need to pop-up.

The adapted Web-based learning environment

together with two learning modules about Internet

and its applications for disabled-oriented informa-

tion searching will be offered to the students for

testing.

The scenarios developed by young people with

different disabilities and improved will be presented

to a group of elderly people (50-65 years old) being

participants within the project IECUVADVLA. The

main topic of the discussion with this group will be

the lifelong learning of elderly people by using the

Web.

Also the adapted Web-based learning environ-

ment will be presented and tested. This will be

available for elderly people who would like to learn

within the European Distance Learning Centre de-

veloped within EURO H.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The importance of e-learning and particularly of the

Web for disabled is recognized but the process of

designing accessible e-learning courses for them is

very complex. It requires attention to many variables

and considerations of needs what are often unpre-

dictable. Disabled people can not always express

their needs or wishes or have not awareness to plan

their future career.

Scenarios which resemble a set of stories, written

or spoken, can express multiple perspectives on

complex events giving meaning to these events. We

consider that they are suitable for shaping learning

environments for disabled because they present

alternatives images.

Effective scenarios need not to be always right;

they need to foster discussions that are very impor-

tant for disabled people who are often isolated so-

cially. If the endpoints of a scenario are unbelievably

extreme, then the uncertainties as variables can be

moved closer to what should be achieved. It is im-

portant to determine disabled people to articulate

their needs and the developers of e-Learning envi-

ronments to understand and to try to integrate these

needs and wishes into the systems.

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361

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