Cecilia Avila

Learning Object Recommendations Based on Quality and Item Response Theory

Nowadays, teachers and students continue to face the problem to find high quality learning objects for learning and teaching. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an innovative approach, which considers Item Response Theory (IRT) for recommending to students or teachers Learning Objects (LOs) of high quality in the context of the Learning Objects Economy, which is a marketplace for sharing and reuse of LOs. Recommendations provide to teachers or students the needed support for finding high quality learning objects taking advantage of the previous quality evaluations carry out by peers. An evaluation of our approach was carried out in a real scenario which allowed us to verify the applicability of the process for generating good recommendations.

Cocreation and Evaluation of Inclusive and Accessible Open Educational Resources: A Mapping Toward the IMS Caliper

The aim of this paper is to introduce a model to cocreate and evaluate inclusive and accessible open educational resources (IA-OERs) toward the perspective of the IMS caliper analytics framework. The model was applied by 72 teachers of primary and secondary schools who cocreated and evaluated IA-OERs in the context of the validation phase of the inclusive learning project. The evaluation of the IA-OERs covered two aspects: Web accessibility and quality. Moreover, an accessibility dashboard was developed to display the graphics of the results obtained from the Web accessibility evaluation.

Supporting Open Access to Teaching and Learning of People with Disabilities

Over the past years, several frameworks have been developed aiming to support inclusive learning by 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 learner 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, 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, which aims 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.

Accessibility evaluation improvement using Case Based Reasoning

Nowadays, many web content editors allow teachers to create web content as learning objects; however, most of these editors do not generate accessible web content. In many cases, the generated web content is not in accordance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As a result, teachers and students with disabilities, e.g. people with visual impairment, people with hearing impairment, among others, could not properly use the web content in their learning or teaching processes. Moreover, some automatic tools for accessibility evaluation do not evaluate the web content using all the criteria from the guidelines; the rest are usually evaluated by humans (manual evaluation). In this paper, we introduce a tool to support accessibility evaluation in the generated web content when teachers use the TinyMCE web content editor. In this manner, we help them to identify web accessibility failures that can be improved. We also introduce a new approach for the web content accessibility manual evaluation process by applying the Case Based Reasoning technique. This work has been developed in the context of the European funded ALTER-NATIVA Project.

A web content accessibility evaluation process for learning objects in the context of a virtual learning environment

A wide variety of web content editors that are included on virtual learning environments, help teachers to create learning objects as web pages to support their teaching processes, those editors add some accessibility features to the generated web content . However in most of the cases, the generated web content is not always according to all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). As a result, teachers and students with disabilities could not properly use the web content in their learning or teaching process. In this paper, we introduce a plug-in for the TinyMCE web content editor to support the web content accessibility manual evaluation process by applying the Case Based Reasoning technique. It is useful, when teachers use the TinyMCE editor upon the ATutor virtual learning environment, because teachers can identify web accessibility failures that can be improved by using recommendations provided by human evaluators.

A Case-based Reasoning Approach to Validate Grammatical Gender and Number Agreement in Spanish language

Across Latin America 420 indigenous languages are spoken. Spanish is considered a second language in indigenous communities and is progressively introduced in education. However, most of the tools to support teaching processes of a second language have been developed for the most common languages such as English, French, German, Italian, etc. As a result, only a small amount of learning objects and authoring tools have been developed for indigenous people considering the specific needs of their population. This paper introduces Multilingual-Tiny as a web authoring tool to support the virtual experience of indigenous students and teachers when they are creating learning objects in indigenous languages or in Spanish language, in particular, when they have to deal with the grammatical structures of Spanish. Multilingual-Tiny has a module based on the Case-based Reasoning technique to provide recommendations in real time when teachers and students write texts in Spanish. An experiment was performed in order to compare some local similarity functions to retrieve cases from the case library taking into account the grammatical structures. As a result we found the similarity function with the best performance.

A Web Content Accessibility Evaluation Process for Learning Objects in the Context of a Virtual Learning Environment

A wide variety of web content editors that are included on virtual learning environments, help teachers to create learning objects as web pages to support their teaching processes, those editors add some accessibility features to the generated web content . However in most of the cases, the generated web content is not always according to all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). As a result, teachers and students with disabilities could not properly use the web content in their learning or teaching process. In this paper, we introduce a plug-in for the TinyMCE web content editor to support the web content accessibility manual evaluation process by applying the Case Based Reasoning technique. It is useful, when teachers use the TinyMCE editor upon the ATutor virtual learning environment, because teachers can identify web accessibility failures that can be improved by using recommendations provided by human evaluators.