Covadonga Rodrigo, Francisco Iniesto Research Chair “Technology and Accessibility” School of Computer Science UNED – Fundacion Vodafone España

1. Holistic vision for creating accessible services
based on MOOCs
Covadonga Rodrigo, Francisco Iniesto
Research Chair “Technology and Accessibility”
School of Computer Science
UNED – Fundacion Vodafone España

2. CONTEXT: BENEFITS OF LLL FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
 The access and integration process for people with functional diversity in the education system
is positive and irreversible.
 There is a growing proportion of people with disabilities which choose distance education
universities (eLearning) for their studies. 7.500 enrolled students at UNED (2014) represents
50% of total spanish univeristy students with dissability
Evolution of enrolment of disabled students over period 2003 – 2015 at UNED
2554
2966
3462
3830
4283 4224
4808
6294 6104
7469
7670
7847
7469
2307
2936
3398
3721
4128 4037
4597
5773 5861
7098
8068
8669
8225
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
10000
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Nº de Estudiantes
Nº de Matrículas
Nr Students
Nr. Enrollments

3. ACCESSIBLE MOOC LEARNING
.
• Openness
• Low cost
• Ubiquity
• Acquiring knowledge
• Social learning
• Achieving new competences
• Develop professionally
But also important barriers:
• Registration process
• Multimedia content (even
assessment)
In case of vulnerable learner groups, MOOCs include special benefits such as:

4. Issues to be faced
• Pedagogical and visual design of the MOOCs,
information architecture, usability and visual and
interaction design could be having a negative impact
on student engagement, retention and completion
rates stressed in case of students with disabilities.
• Whilst designing a service based on MOOCs to be used
by people with functional diversity, it is important to
take into account the accessibility level of each of the
parts of the system and also the role of the meta-
information related to functional diversity: defining
specific user profiles, tagging Los, device and GUI
personalization,….

5. This work
1. Analysis of the critical factors necessary for
building a specification of requirements for an
accessible MOOC system
2. Outline of all the accessibility issues that must
be addressed, regarding to (EU4ALL project):
 User's characteristics: their preferences and needs
 Context information: which devices is the user using
at a particular moment to access the system?
 The learning resources: characteristics of the
resources at two levels: at educational content level
and at presentation level

6. MOOC data
defined
by achievable competences
METADATA
METADATA
METADATA
METADATA
METADATA

7. SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS
Enriched user profile. There are two main groups of information:
1. list of professional competences the user wants to achieve -> what the person wants
to learn
2. User’s device personalization: preferences / needed assistive technologies ->
technical needs regarding user’s functional diversity.
Professional profiles defined by competences. The system should have professional skills
clearly defined in order to be mapped to user expectations.
MOOC content defined by achievable competences. It is also crucial to get the
information of competencies within the MOOC platforms and courses.
Accessible MOOCs. Accessibility evaluation on MOOC platforms and their courses will
facilitate the development of an automated recommendation list adapted to user’s
functional diversity (user’s profile).

8. MOOC data
defined
by achievable competences
METADATA APPLICATION PROILE

9. Enabling User Adaptable
Interfaces
strategic to describe learner’s
preferences and needs by means
of a specific profile.
Multimodal Adaptive Interfaces
more intelligent interfaces that are
adapted to the user in a natural and
progressive way, trying to detect their
characteristics so that the system can
adapt to their level and preferences.
Interfaces should adapt to the person,
not vice versa.
USER ADAPTABLE/ADAPTIVE INTERFACES
An effective e-learning environment should take into account each learner’s
abilities, together with learning goals, where learning takes place, and which
specific devices the learner uses.
•Display content information: define preferences related to text (fonts and
colors), video (resolution), mouse (pointer, motion), etc.
•Control information: keyboard (virtual), zoom preferences, voice recognition.
•Privacy and data protection information: privacy and the data integrity is
considered very important, since the exchanged information can be closely
related to the user’s functional diversity.

10. LEARNING RESOURCES STANDARDS TO
IMPROVE ACCESSIBILITY
AccessForAll (ACCMD, 2004) of e-learning content. Identifies which types of resource
are available in a LO that can be used to present the same content to a given learner,
but by means of different media.
The IMS Access for All (AfA) Digital Resource Description (DRD) 3.0 - draft released in
2012 - aims to solve these problems by radically changing the point of view: now it is
possible to declare one or more access modes for each resource, define existing
accessible adaptations and whether they come from the specific original resource.

11. Enables matching of the characteristics of resources to the needs and
preferences of individual users. A common language for describing:
•A learner's needs and preferences with respect to how the learner can best
interact with digital resources, including configuration of assistive technologies.
This is represented using the IMS Global Access For All Personal Needs and
Preferences (PNP) v3.0 [AfAPNP, 12] specification. Provides a means to describe
how a user desires to access online learning content and related applications.
•Digital learning resources. This is represented using the IMS Global Access For
All Digital Resource Description (DRD) v3.0 specification [AfADRD, 12].
AfA PNP can be used independently, for example to deliver the required
or desired user interface to the user, or in combination with the AfADRD to
deliver digital resources that meet a user's needs and preferences.
IMS ACCESS FOR ALL SPECIFICATION

12. ANALYSIS OF STANDARDS: ACCESSIBLE METADATA FOR
USER PROFILE DEFINITION
Enrichment of user profile definition: functional disability (assistive technologies, device
user preferences)

13. • recent IMS specification is the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP),
which is related to the accessibility of e-learning assessment.
• based on several specifications, including IMS Question & Test
Interoperability (QTI) v2.1, IMS Access for All, and IMS Common Cartridge.
ACCESSIBILITY ON STUDENT ASSESSMENT

14. User eXperience improvements
shaping the user experience of their courses: how the content
is organized, how menu sections are labelled or how
different pages are structured is absolutely crucial. And for
these decisions, human-computer interaction guidelines,
usability best practices or recommendations for writing usable
online texts should be consider.
The User Centered Design Model (UCDM) (Boticario et al, 2014)
Provide an educational-oriented approach for building personalised e-
learning environments that focuses on putting the learners' needs in the
centre of the development process.
In MOOC contexts, user centered design and user-centered evaluation
have been driven by the concept of 'task'. The student needs to be able to
perform tasks such as studying course materials, taking notes, watching
videos, writing assignments, accessing forum or chats, communicating with a
curator, etc.

15. Holistic vision for creating accessible services
based on MOOCs
Covadonga Rodrigo, Francisco Iniesto
covadonga@lsi.uned.es, finiesto2@alumno.uned.es
Research Chair “Technology and Accessibility”
www.catedrafundavionvodafone.uned.es
@UNEDVodafone