Abstract:Over the Past Years, Severalframeworks Have Been Developed Aiming to Support Inclusive

Abstract:Over the past years, severalframeworks have been developed aiming to support inclusive learningby the provision of flexible or individualized learning experiences.These frameworks recognize the broad diversity of learners and they provide specific learning design principles to ensure accessibility of all learnertypes to the learning environment or education delivery. In the field of Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL), accessibility has been recognized as a key design consideration for TeL systems, ensuring that learners with diverse needs and preferences (such as learners with disabilities) can access technology-supported resources, services and experiences, in general.Within this context, several initiatives have emerged, such as the Inclusive Learning project, which aims to promote an inclusive learning culture and support teachers in designing, sharing and delivering accessible educational resources in the form of Learning Objects (LOs). To this end, the scope of this book chapter is to present an online educational portal, namely the Inclusive Learning Portal,whichaims to support open access to teaching and learning of people with disabilities. More specifically, the Inclusive Learning Portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of accessible LOs, complementary services that enable easy development and delivery of accessible LOs, as well as teacher training opportunities in the use of these services.

Keywords: web accessibility, inclusive learning, open access, repository, portal, people with disabilities

1.Introduction

Inclusive learning has been the focus of numerous efforts worldwide (Florian & Linklater, 2010). Therefore, several frameworks have been developed aiming to support the provision of flexible or individualized learning experiences thataddress inclusion such as differentiated learning (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006) and universal design for learning (Rose& Meyer, 2002). These frameworks 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 alllearner types to the learning environment or education delivery.

In the field of Technology-enhanced Learning (TeL), accessibility has been recognized as a key design consideration for TeL systems ensuringthat learners with diverse needs and preferences (such as learners with disabilities) canaccess technology-supported resources, services and experiences in general(Seale & Cooper, 2009). There have been many generic definitions of the term accessibility, but IMS Global Learning Consortium (2004) offers an education-specific definition of both disability and accessibility: “the term disability is defined as a mismatch between learner’s needs and the education offered. It is therefore not a personal trait, but an artifact of the relationship between the learner and the learning environment or education delivery. Accessibilityis the ability of the learning environment to adjust to the needs and preferences of each learner. Accessibility is determined by the flexibility of the education environment (with respect to presentation, control methods, access modality and learner supports) and the availability of adequate alternative-but-equivalent content and activities”. This definition has been adopted by the ISO/IEC Standard 24751 “Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility in e-Learning, Education and Training”. ISO/IEC 24751 provides a common framework to describe and specify learner needs and preferences on the one hand and the corresponding description of the digital educational resources on the other. This enables individual learner preferences and needs to be matched with the appropriate user interface tools and digital educational resources(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36, 2008a; ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36 2008b).

Within this context, several initiatives haveemerged, such as theInclusive Learning project, which aimsto promote an inclusive learning culture and support teachers in designing, sharing and delivering accessible educational resources in the form of Learning Objects (LOs). To this end, the scope of this book chapteris to present an online educational portal, namely the Inclusive Learning Portalthat aims to supportopen access to teaching and learning of people with disabilities. More specifically, the Inclusive Learning Portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of accessible LOs, complementary services that enable easy development and delivery of accessible LOs, as well as teacher training opportunities in the use of these services.

The book chapter is structured as follows. Following this introduction, section 2describes therequirements of the InclusiveLearning Portal, based on which we compare existing portalsin Section 3. Afterwards, Section 4 presents the conceptual architecture of the Inclusive Learning Portaland its main components, while section 5presents the implementation of the Inclusive Learning Portal. Finally, we discuss our main conclusions.

2.Requirements of the inclusive learning portal

This section focuses on the first step of the development life-cycle (Avison & Shah, 1997), namely requirements analysis, by first setting a common terminology, identifying the main portal users and afterwards discussing functional and non-functional requirements.

2.1Terminology

The Inclusive Learning Portal aims to include accessible LOs organized in two (2) aggregation levels, as follows:

• Accessible educational resources are typically digital materials such as video and audio lectures (podcasts), references and readings, workbooks and textbooks, which conform to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (W3C, 2008).
• Accessible Training Coursesaresequences of learning activities, which include accessible educational resources, tools and services.They followa specific pedagogical strategy, which is suitable for disabled people training, and they are conducted entirely online targeting specific educational objectives.

2.2Users

The Inclusive Learning Portal identifiestwo main types of portal users, as follows:

• Teachers of People with Disabilities:they are the main recipient of the functionality offered by the Inclusive Learning Portal. They are able to create an account, which allows them to access the services offered by the portal. Teachers are able to search for accessible LOs, as well as create and upload their own accessible LOs. They can also deliver accessible LOs (namely, training courses) to their disabled learners. Moreover, they can communicate with other teachers. Finally, they can engage in training opportunities towards enhancing their competences about inclusive design and accessibility.
• Learners: they are using only a limited set of the Inclusive Learning Portal services. More specifically, they can enrollto accessible training courses offeredby theirteachers.

2.3Functional Requirements

In this section, we present the main functionalities that are should be offered by the Inclusive Learning Portal, in order to allow its users to address theirindividual needs. These functionalities can be summarized below:

• User profiling:teachersshould be able to create their profile and access a dashboard with the activities that they have performed in the Inclusive Learning Portal.
• UploadingAccessible LOs: Teachers should be able to upload and store accessible LOs to the Inclusive Learning Portal by describing them with appropriate educational metadata.
• Authoring Accessible LOs: Teachers should be able to use authoring tools for developing accessible LOs in the form of accessible training courses.
• Annotating Accessible LOs:Teachers should be able to rate, comment, tag and bookmark accessible LOs. These annotations are expected to be used by other teachers for assessing the quality of the accessible LOs during searching
• Searching Accessible LOs:Teachers should be able to search for accessible LOs across existing repositories by either using formal metadata added by the authors of these LOs e.g. grade level, subject domain, disability type etc., or by using social metadata added by the users of the LOs (namely, the teachers) such as social tags and ratings.
• Delivering Accessible LOs:Teachers should be able to organize and deliver their own accessible training coursesto their disabled 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 colleaguesin order to exchange ideas and best teaching practices.
• Participating to training academies: Users should have access to training academies that offer them training opportunities towards enhancing their competences about inclusive learning and accessibility.

2.4Non-Functional Requirements

In additionto the previous requirements, there are also non-functional requirements that can influence the design of the Inclusive Learning Portal, as follows:

• Scalability:InclusiveLearning Portal is expected to be used in European Level. Therefore, it is clear that the underlying network, hardware and software infrastructure should have sufficient capacity to ensure high availability.
• API:The Inclusive LearningPortal should be extensible and allow for the reuse of the LOsmetadata it harvests and stores. A search API should be provided in order for third parties to utilize the Inclusive Learning infrastructure.
• Usability:Inclusive LearningPortal should deliver various tools (such as metadata authoring and course authoring tools) which should be intuitive and easy to use, in order to reduce the workload of teachers and keep them involved.
• Privacy:The Inclusive Learning Portal will store teachers’ personal information. Therefore the portal should protect any personal or private information belonging to the teachers. On the other hand, disabled learners’ personal information will not be stored in the portal.
• Accessibility: Inclusive Learning Portal servicesthat are accessed by disabled learners should be accessible to them. This means that these services should utilize Web Accessibility Standards such as W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and ISO/IEC 24751 Access for All Standard.

3.Related Work

In this section, we provide an overview of existing portal solutions that aim to support open access to teaching and learning of people with disabilities. Moreover, we compare the features of these portal with the functional requirements presented in section 2.2. We have identified five (5) existing portals, namely: (a) The TILE Portal that was developed in the framework of a nationally funded project in Canada referred to as: “Inclusive Learning Exchange” (Nevile et al, 2005; Harrison & Treviranus, 2003), (b) the EPKhas Portal, which has been developed by the School of Educational Studies of the University of Science in Malaysia (Lee, 2010), (c) the TESConnect Portal of the Times Educational Supplement Magazine, (d) the LALIDC Portal developed by Louisiana Low Incidence Disabilities Consortium in USA and (e) the KlasCement Portal, which is supported by the Flemish government and several educational partners in Belgium (Pynoo et al., 2011).Table 1 summarizes the features of the indentified portals.

Table 1: Comparing Existing Portals with Inclusive Learning Portal’s Functional Requirements. Legend: requirement supported (),not supported ().

As we can notice from Table 1, the main requirements that are supported by existing portal solutions are: user profiling, uploading accessible LOs, annotating accessible LOs, searching accessible LOs and communicating with users. On the other hand, there are several requirements that are not supportedby existing federated infrastructures such as: authoring accessible delivering accessible LOs and participating to training academies. As a result, it is evident that the Inclusive Learning Portal aims to advance existing solutions and offer an enhanced open access online educational support to assistteaching and learning of people with disabilities.

4.The inclusive learning Portal Architecture

This section presents the Inclusive Learning Portal architecture that has been designed based on the functional requirements defined in section 2.2.

4.1Overview

The overall architecture of the Inclusive Learning Portal is presented in Figure 1. As we can notice, at the lower level there are existing repositories with accessible LOs. The metadata of these repositories are harvested and stored to the Inclusive Learning Repository, which is located in the middle level of the architecture. Moreover, in the middle level of the architecture there istheeducational metadata harvester, which aims to harvest metadata that have been created by the authors of the LOs and they are stored in the external repositories.

In the upper level of the architecture there is the Inclusive Learning Portal interface which includes (a) a searching mechanism for accessing the Inclusive Learning Repository, (b) collaboration tools, which facilitate teachers to communicate and collaborate with other teachers, (c) a metadata authoring tool adding metadata to accessible LOsand (d) an inclusive learning handbook, which provides the teachers with an easy guide to go through the principles of inclusive design and accessibility, as well as to understand the process of developing and sharing accessible LOs.

Finally, there is also a course management system, where teachers can design and deliver accessible training courses to their disable learners. These courses are stored in a repository, which are also harvested and stored to the Inclusive Learning Repository and they can be re-used by other teachers of the Inclusive Learning Portal.

The next section elaborates on the components of the architecture in more details.

Figure 1: The Inclusive Learning Portal Architecture

4.2Components

External Repositories include LORs that have been developed in the framework of previous EU-funded or national funded projects and the Inclusive Learning Portal aims to federate.

TheMetadata Harvester collects educational metadata from the external repositories. It includes four sub-components, which are the following:

• Harvester: it harvests metadata records provided by external repositories. In order to ensure interoperability of the harvesting process, the harvester has been based on open standards such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Moreover, all metadata records from external repositories are transformed to Inclusive Learning metadata application profile (Inclusive Learning AP). Inclusive Learning AP is based on the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (IEEE LOM) standard (IEEE LTSC, 2005) and it has been tailored specifically to support the classification of LOs based on their accessibility characteristics. Inclusive Learning AP is used to describe all LOs made available through the Inclusive Learning Portal. Apart from ensuring a unified way of describing LOs, it serves as basis for enriching incomplete metadata.
• Validator: it validates the metadata records that are harvested by the harvester, so as to ensure that they conform to the Inclusive LearningAP.
• Link checking: it is used in order to verify that the metadata record includes a valid URL to the respective LO 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.

TheInclusive Learning Repositoryaggregates the metadata of the LOsthat are produced from the Inclusive LearningPortal and harvested from external repositories.

TheInclusive Learning Portal is the interface that is presented to the portal’s users. It includes four main sub-components, namely:

• Search: it facilitatesteachersinsearching for accessible LOs by following different approaches such as: (a) simple keyword search: using keywords and combinations, the teacher is able to search through the accessible LOs within the Inclusive Learning Portal. The keyword search uses the metadata that describe the accessible LOs, taking into account the metadata provided by external repositories as well as social tags provided by users, (b) facetted search: the teacher is able to qualify the keyword search with several additional facets such as the external repositories in which to search, the language of the results, the LO type, the disability type etc. When a value is selected for a facet, the interface dynamically changes and provides the numbers of results for each facet that match the selected criteria, (d) 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 LO(s).
• Collaboration Tools:enableteachers to easily communicate and collaborate with other teachers for sharing ideas, as well as best set-up. These tools include a forum, as well as a private messaging tool.
• Metadata Authoring Tool: enables users to characterize their own accessible LOs with educational metadata (following the Inclusive Learning AP) and upload them to the Inclusive Learning Portal. This tool is also used by the Inclusive LearningPortal users to edit and enrich the metadata of accessible LOs that are harvested by the external repositories.
• Inclusive Learning Handbook:this sub-componentprovides 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. Finally, it provides guidelines for developing accessible LOs, as well as examples for restricting or eliminating nonaccessible elements, such as the use of extensive amounts of text, flash animations, and other non-accessible design options.

The Course Management System enables teachers to design accessible training courses and deliver them to their disabled learners. These courses are also harvested and stored to the Inclusive Learning Repository and they can be re-used by other teachers of the Inclusive Learning Portal. Moreover, through this course management system, teachers are able to participate in teacher training courses that will facilitate them in enhancing their competences in process of designing and developing accessible LOs.