The main  objective of e-learning is to provide instruction and education to all kind of learners independently of their different places, different cultures or of different abilities. With this vision, e-learning should be barrierfree - accessible and usable - for all. Furthermore, W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has developed a series of guidelines which help to ensure that Web resources can be accessed by people with disabilities. However, the accessibility of e-learning provides additional challenges that may not be faced when providing access to other Web resources.

In this context, this presentation will cover these issues and will focus mainly on projects developed by our research Laboratory UTIC. We mention in particular the two following projects:

1. Development of barrier-free learning environment for students with disabilities: our aim is to transcend physical disabilities and physical distance with distance learning technology. Our project consists in developing dedicated tools in order to give handicapped users the opportunity to access education using Internet and new technologies just like any other students. We focused in first works on visualimpairment.

2. The project WebSign which aims to offer, to the deaf community, a tool facilitating communication through the Web. The objective of this tool is to interpret automatically texts in visual-gestural-spatial language by using avatar technology. Websign permits also to implement new applications dedicated to this community like a generator of e-learning course for deaf pupil, a messenger tool and others applications.

TeLearn - European Research on Technology-Enhanced Learning

European research on technology-enhanced learning investigates how information and communication technologies can be used to support learning, teaching and competence development throughout life. The research question is how to improve learning outcomes, abilities, and skills by using and further developing ICT. This entails for truly interdisciplinary activities, increasingly based on scientific understandings of how people learn. In 2007 and 2008 the foci of research were on technologically-mediated responsive environments for learning and on the development of adaptive and intuitive learning systems (longer-term vision).

Responsive environments were defined as technologically mediated learning environments which motivate, engage and inspire learners, and make it possible to personalize learning experiences to respond to specific needs and contexts. At the workplace, these environments would support the transformation of learning outcomes into permanent and valuable knowledge assets, both for the individuals and for the organization.  With adaptive and intuitive learning systems we referred to systems that self-configure their operations to optimally assist and respond to the learner's activities. These systems should be able to identify learner's requirements from monitoring progress in an intelligent way. They would make best use of the individual learning and cognitive abilities of the learner and produce meaningful advice to both learners and teachers.

In 2009, the target of research continued to be on responsive environments - with specific foci on the design of the classroom of the 21st century (addressing innovation in learning and teaching, as well as systems capable of exploiting emotions to leverage learning. It also included new areas of work on appliances and toys to promote specific skills and learning abilities, and new technological approaches  to intertwine learning and creative processes.

Examples of Research

-Blending learning and knowledge management @ workplace

Research addresses the effective acquisition of competencies and their management in relation to (changing) business workflows. This includes composing/interlacing learning, knowledge management and business processes systems to bridge competency needs between learners and organizational objectives. Solutions are being demonstrated in diverse organizational settings, including car industry, healthcare, and banking. An example is the MATURE project, which is targeting the agility of companies and their employees to learn and develop their competencies efficiently in order to improve productivity of knowledge work. MATURE conceives individual learning processes to be interlinked (the output of a learning process is input to others) in a knowledge-maturing process in which knowledge changes in nature. This knowledge can take the form of classical content in varying degrees of maturity, but also involves tasks & processes or semantic structures. The goal is to understand this maturing process better, based on empirical studies, and to build tools and services to reduce maturing barriers.

-Supporting individualisation in learning - adaptivity

Focus of research here is on empowering learners through proactive coaching and technologies that support the personalisation and adaptivity of learning. It combines work on user modelling, intelligent feedback, social tagging, semantic relationships among conceptual models, language technologies. For instance, the GRAPPLE project is researching environment that guide learners through a life-long learning experience, automatically adapting to personal preferences, prior knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the personal or social context in which the learning takes place. GRAPPLE includes authoring tools that enable educators to provide adaptive learning material to the learners, including adaptive interactive components (visualizations, simulations, virtual reality). Authoring includes also designing learning activities and defining pedagogical properties of and adaptation strategies for the content and activities.

-Engaging learners in science and maths

The aim is to develop intelligent software providing feedback and supporting dialogues, active and exploratory learning for scientific and mathematical concepts. An example is the SCY project. Students are given a mission to achieve (e.g. a students of biology which has to learn about nutrients is assigned the mission "how can cow produce healthier milk?"). Fulfilling the mission requires a combination of knowledge from different domains (e.g., physics and mathematics, or biology and engineering).An adaptive  learning environment supports the mission advising students on appropriate learning actions, resources, tools and scaffolds, or peer learners that can support the learning process.

-Serious games

Games capture attention, engage, motivate, and generate empathy.  Can we exploit these characteristics to help our children to learn? TEL research is exploring innovative games that would guide the students to achieve specific learning goals by playing. These games modify the game dynamic (e.g. adapt the story, introducing a new activity) to help the players to learn specific concepts. 80Days, for instance, is researching non-invasive educational interventions (personalized guidance or hinting and sequencing of learning situations and activities) by adapting the storyline on the basis of interpretations and assessments of the learners knowledge/learning progress within the game environment.  Another example is xDelia that is using serious games and insights from the role of emotions in people's decisions to create the next generation of training systems for financial decision makers

Links

- EU activities (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/telearn-digicult/telearn-objectives_en.html)