Matching appropriate materials for disabled learners in a lifelong learning environment

Abstract

Learning environments should provide accessible learning material. Research has focused on improving the discovery of learning materials suitable for the needs of people with disabilities. Most current practice focuses on disability type without considering the learner’s competence or their functional capability, that is, how well someone has the functional ability to perceive and perform tasks or activities. This research proposes the Matching Resource Functional capability and Competence model (MRFC) for accessible learning material and appropriate learning path, based on competences and functional capabilities. In the data model, intended learning outcomes (ILOs) contain provisions for recording capability and subject matter content. The MRFC model was reviewed and validated by 10 experts. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated through three experiments. These were designed to evaluate the reaction of learners to the MRFC against other methods, to evaluate the participants’ performance, and their experience. For Experiment I, a learning path was generated by algorithm based on a learner’s competence within a given domain. Functional capability was used to match material by using a presentation schema between the ILOs’ nodes in the learning path and the type of material which the learner was able to perceive. A presentation schema is a digest of the kinds of content, material types, and accessible features that people with different functional capabilities can perceive. Experiment II.1 showed that those who used a combination of functional capability and competence-based learning mode (CFCM) of the MRFC model had better results than those who only used a competence-based learning mode (CBM) or a free-browsing learning mode. Experiment II.2 showed that the CFCM was better than the CBM. Experiment II.3 showed that those who used the CFCM for learning had better learning outcomes and higher ratings of usefulness of learning material. The results for Experiment III showed that all variables for user experience and accessibility for the MRFC model were significantly higher than 3. These findings indicate that the participants agreed with all questions in this experiment.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

Catalogue record

Export record