Liberating the Learning Environment – Automating Multimodal Content

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Opinion

Liberating the Learning Environment – Automating Multimodal Content

9/5/2006

By Keith Bain, Saint Mary’s University

Like it or not, lecturing is still an integral part of the university learning experience. Even pure eLearning offerings contain elements of lecture. These are often disguised as articles posted in text (html) format or blogs, which may simply be edited and formatted transcriptions of a given lecture topic. In essence, whether one listens to a lecture or reads one, there remains a transmission of ideas, thoughts, and facts from those possessing these ideas, thoughts, and facts (i.e. the “instructor”) to those who don’t (i.e. the “learner”). One challenge, therefore, is to ensure that content is provided in an accessible format. Whether done live during a lecture or via eLearning platforms, this has proven challenging.

Accessibility is a topic rife with legal, cultural, and social complexities, but for our purposes, accessible content can be thought of as providing flexibility to meet different user needs, preferences, and situations. “Users” in this context refers to an increasingly diverse student body, which includes mature and foreign students, students with obvious disabilities, those with aptly named hidden disabilities, and distance learners.

At the individual level, all students have relative strengths and learning preferences. Auditory learners for example, may find it challenging to understand information presented visually and vice versa. To further complicate matters, instructors are usually unaware of these learning preferences. Sometimes the students themselves don’t have a firm grasp of how they learn best, although increasingly instructors are recommending online self-evaluators such as VARK or the Felder-Soloman diagnostic.

Even in conventional situations such as the lecture hall, not all learners have equal access to spoken information. Deaf or hard of hearing students may not be able to access speech without supports such as sign interpretation, stenography, or note taking. Many students may be taking classes taught in a non-native language and struggling to keep up. Note-taking for many is a particularly difficult challenge.

In the online world of eLearning, similar accessibility challenges abound. Students lacking high speed Internet connections will struggle to access high bandwidth multimedia. Visually impaired students may not be able to fully access Web pages due to accessibility design issues and compatibility with screen reader technology (software such as JAWS or Home Page Reader) that “reads” content to the user through text-to-speech synthesis. Content is typically provided in a “one size fits all” format, although if asked users would choose differing forms that accommodate personal preferences. These and other realities have prompted a movement to adopt