270 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION, VOL. 62, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2019 Effects of New Supportive Technologies for Blind and Deaf Engineering Students in Online Learning Concha Batanero , Luis de-Marcos , Jaana Holvikivi, José Ramón Hilera, and Salvador Otón Abstract—Contribution: A redesign of the Moodle platform to adapt digital educational content [learning objects (LOs)] to the speciﬁc needs of students with disabilities. The approach, extend- able to a range of disciplines, was empirically tested with blind and deaf engineering students. Background: Previous studies identiﬁed difﬁculties that blind and deaf students face in accessing digital content for learning. General guidelines and speciﬁc tools are available to help edu- cators adapt digital content and existing learning platforms for access by students with varying abilities/capacities. Such tools are usually for a speciﬁc disability rather than a range of capacities, and few provide empirical evidence of effectiveness. Intended Outcomes: The engineering-related digital content adapted using the techniques described in this paper should enable blind and/or deaf students to use an oscilloscope, under- stand communication channels, and distinguish the different types of telecommunication networks. Application Design: The Moodle learning platform was adapted using existing e-learning accessibility standards so that digital LOs could be automatically presented in formats accessible to blind and/or deaf students. This model is extendable for other types of disabilities, helping educators adapt existing content for access by students with differing capacities. The teacher adds content (in non-auditory and non-visual formats to describe content otherwise inaccessible to deaf or blind students) and stu- dents upload reusable proﬁles/metadata describing their speciﬁc accessibility needs to connect to suitably adjusted content. Findings: Learning improvement with the adjusted platform was evaluated via multiple choice pre- and post-tests. Students’ learning performance improved signiﬁcantly across all groups: blind (45%), deaf (46.25%) and deaf-blind (87.5%). Index Terms—Accessibility, accessible education, distance learning, educational technology, learning management systems, students with disabilities. I. I NTRODUCTION W ITH the advent of the Internet and the development of new technologies, society has changed. People now Manuscript received July 9, 2018; revised November 1, 2018, December 17, 2018, and January 29, 2019; accepted February 3, 2019. Date of publication March 5, 2019; date of current version October 29, 2019. This work was supported by WAMDIA Project through the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. (Corresponding author: Concha Batanero.) C. Batanero is with the Computer Engineering Department, Universidad de Alcalá, 28871 Alcalá de Henares, Spain (e-mail: concha.batanero@uah.es). L. de-Marcos, J. R. Hilera, and S. Otón are with the Computer Science Department, Universidad de Alcalá, 28871 Alcalá de Henares, Spain (e-mail: luis.demarcos@uah.es; jose.hilera@uah.es; salvador.oton@uah.es). J. Holvikivi is with the Information and Communications Technology Department, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, 02650 Espoo, Finland (e-mail: jaana.holvikivi@gmail.com). This paper has supplementary downloadable material available at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org, provided by the authors. Digital Object Identiﬁer 10.1109/TE.2019.2899545 interact and communicate differently. Web pages and online applications have spread rapidly, transforming human activi- ties. Education is no exception in this regard: the emergence of online or e-learning has facilitated the development of new learning methods wherein educational resources are presented via the Web. In this paper, e-learning is broadly deﬁned as “all forms of electronic supported learning and teaching, which are procedural in character and aim to effect the construction of knowledge with reference to individual experience, practice and knowledge of the learner” [1]. Interest in online teaching has increased gradually. Initial educational experiences date back to 1996 [2]. Research studies indicate e-learning has progressed, [3]–[5], and now has two main advantages over traditional forms of learning: (1) course content can be accessed anywhere, any time; (2) stu- dents can access information, such as comments and teachers’ answers, as often as necessary. These advantages are partially facilitated by learning objects (LOs), which can be used as building blocks of e-learning actions. LOs have attracted much research attention in the ﬁeld of education, and numerous def- initions have been suggested [6], [7]. In this paper, LOs are understood as digital self-contained and reusable educational resources with a clear learning objective. LOs are particularly interesting to support students with different capacities because they can contain a diversity of digital assets that present learn- ing content in different formats, like audio, video or text. They also facilitate including additional material such as text descriptions. All this is offered in self-contained portable units of learning. The virtual nature of learning platforms and LOs can then be leveraged to improve accessibility. The concept of acces- sibility has been of interest in recent years to standardization organizations [8], [9], and to scholars [10]. Accessibility fea- tures have been applied to the new technologies, and especially to Web applications, leading to the emergence of standards for Web accessibility [11]–[13]. Many countries have passed laws that set these standards and require compliance [14]–[19]. Various initiatives [20], [21] have focused on making engi- neering curricula accessible to hearing- and visually-impaired students. However, other studies in this area conducted in the U.K. [22], and USA [23] show that students with differ- ent capacities have difﬁculties with technical environments in higher education. In this paper, the term “different capaci- ties” is preferred for its positive connotations, compared to the negative connotations associated with the term “disabilities”. The objective of this paper is to assess whether the learn- ing performance of blind and deaf students improves with the 0018-9359 c  2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Oklahoma Libraries. Downloaded on September 28,2020 at 18:37:28 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.