Adapting OpenCourseWare Based on the Needs and Preferences of Disabled Learners

Abstract

OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes. With the COVID-19 Pandemic situation, these resources showed the impact of having material and platforms to be reused and shared accessibly in the learning process. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility needs. It is essential to support these learners in their journey to increase their capabilities skill set. The question is, to what extent are these platforms and materials of good quality and accessible by diverse set of learners? On top of that, OCW platforms have complex requirements to convey information and knowledge to the learners in a collaborative environment. OCW platforms need to provide authoring tools to allow authors to develop content. In this research, we are concerned with answering the following research questions: 1) how to evaluate the quality and accessibility of these educational resources?, 2) how to define and represent the accessibility needs and references of learners?, 3) how to include these accessibility needs in the design and implementation of OCW platform and Open Educational Resource (OER). <br /> In this thesis, we address these questions though five main steps: 1) designing quality evaluation metrics to evaluate the quality of OER through multiple dimensions on the platforms, 2) developing an approach for evaluating accessibility of OER though analyzing metadata, 3) semantically representing the accessibility needs and preferences of learners, and the accessibility specifications of OER using ontologies, 4) using ontologies and knowledge graphs for filtering OER based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and providing OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs, and 5) providing guidelines and learnings of developing an accessible OCW (SlideWiki (https://slidewiki.org/)) to address accessibility at the content level based on our development experience in an agile development environment. <br /> The evaluation of our research was done by multiple questionnaires for learners and authors, and through testing the OCW platform and OER with accessibility checking tools. The resultant proved to satisfy more accessibility needs for learners and authors.