This post has been stimulated by exchanges following two recent presentations I attended:

On the 18 November my colleague Robin Stenham (OU Disabled Student Services) gave an internal OU presentation on a new strategy seeking to better embed accessibility for disabled students across OU course production and presentation processes and in all areas of responsibility. For those interested another colleague Doug Clow (IET) did a live blog of the talk and subsequent discussion at:

http://dougclow.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/enabling-greater-accessibility/

One of the questions raised afterward was by a visiting professor from the China Central Radio and TV University: Prof Sun Fuwan. He pointed out that in China they have 60 million (sic. – that must be an underestimate) disabled people, but at university level have separate institutions for disabled students. He was looking for suggestions and potential collaborations to help Chinese universities to be more inclusive.

Then this week I have been trying to participate in the JISC online conference “Innovating e-Learning 2009” (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference09). The Opening Keynote by Charles Leadbeater was entitled “The role of innovation in education”. Charles presented a framework for analysing types of innovation in education in which he classified innovation as:  Improve, Supplement, Reform or Transform.

It is not the purpose of this blog post to discuss this framework. However a brief asynchronous exchange with the presenter afterward, Charles made the following point:

“At the moment Transform is really seen as “Marginal Alternatives for Learners with Special Needs” but if this became the dominant pole would be much better.”

These two interactions have stimulated further thoughts for me on the old debate in education of inclusion verses special provisions. However this is now being set in my mind within my own work on content personalisation for accessibility and the wider area of personalisation in education.

My own position on the inclusion verses special provision debate is that it can never be that one way or the other will best meet the needs of all. The debate then falls into uncomfortable areas of:
• for who is inclusive education best?
• for who is special provision beneficial?
• equally controversially who has the power and right to decide?

I strongly wish to assert here the value of diversity of needs and preferences at the individual level. As in all areas of humanity apparently similar people can have different preferences. It is thus to be expected that two disabled people who, however defined, have similar impairments, might express different preferences  as to how their needs are best met.

In the UK at HE level there has been traditionally little specialist provision for disabled students; this has probably led to some disabled people being excluded. Whereas, at school level the inclusion verses specialist provision pendulum swings leading to a different balance of provision being available at different times.

There are interesting developments beginning to surface around the increasing emphasis on personalised learning and personalisation in technology mediating learning. This brings the whole idea of meeting diversity of needs and preference into the mainstream in a broader sense. The idea of special needs can be replaced with consideration of individual needs. If we can truly work out how to effectively and economically offer such personalisation of learning and fit it within our “formal” structures then education will exclude and under serve far less people (children and adults).

This is a reworking of a post in Cloudworks on a Twitter vs Blogging debate, see:
http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2266.html

The way I use Twitter and Blogs both in authoring and reading modes varies over time depending on what I am working on; the time I give to the online world; my mood; the status of my social connections (face to face and online) and probably many other factors. Twitter currently helps me discoverer blog posts of interest; but blogs help me reflect; they both have their roles.

Further, the whole point of social software is that is use evolves socially. The technologies have particular affordances that lend themselves better to different types of interaction but I “believe” (ironically as a I am by background a systems engineer) that it is the social development of this use that takes precedence over the technical factors in determining which tools become dominant in terms of usage.

We use the tools that enable us to keep in contact with our existing social networks or discover or construct new networks. Now different people use the same tools for different and multiple purposes. This can generate levels of “noise” that some find intolerable. In attempts to mange the noise levels they may filter posts, constrain their networks or shift to alternative tools.

I don’t think this situation will converge to the dominant use of a single tool or even small set of tools for long periods of time. Twitter will have a finite life time.

I find the desire of humans to communicate and our inventiveness in ways of doing it over the millennia fascinating. Web 2.0 is a tiny blip in that. How much better a society we construct though if we do effectively communicate.

This post advocates a systems approach to accessibility and highlights recent relevant developments it the metadata standards world. It is adapted form a paper submitted to the Dublin Core Conference 2009 (#dc2009).

In current web based systems various degrees of automated accessibility responses are possible including personalisation of the content they mediate. If a system is to serve content appropriate to individual users’ needs and preferences (including those that might arise from a disability) and the devices they are using to access that content (which might include assistive technologies) then it needs information about three things:

1. Information about the content itself and any alternatives that may be available

2. Access to information about the users’ needs and preferences for how that content is displayed and interacted with, and

3. Information about the devices the users are using to access the content at any given time

This leads to a requirement for three sets of interrelated metadata: content metadata, user profiles and device profiles. Various candidate standards for each of these exist and others are in development.

Recent Developments in the Metadata Standards World
Interrelated work is ongoing within the IMS Accessibility Special Interest Group (AccSIG) and the W3C’s Ubiquitous Web Applications (UWA) group to harmonise user and device profiles and content metadata for accessibility. At the same time significant steps forward have been recently made in the world of educational metadata under the umbrella of the international standards organisation ISO. They are in the process of agreeing an updated standard for Metadata for Learning Resources (MLR) [1]. It is beyond the scope of this post to report this work in technical detail. However readers should be aware that current standards are likely to be superseded in the near future. They will be replaced by updated standards that represent a harmonised and technically improved approach integrated across the metadata for user profiles, accessibility properties of content and devices or more broadly the delivery context.

The EU4ALL project [2] is contributing to this ongoing work. The work consists of further developing the IMS AccessForAll specification (developing a v2.0 and a core profile) and a standardisation of device profile descriptors. The initial EU4ALL integrated prototypes were based on AccessForAll 1.0 [3] and CC/PP [4] and the approach is being refined in the second generation prototypes with view to making recommendations to the standards bodies. Current issues being addressed in this work include:

• The fact that device characteristics are currently defined both in AccMD/AccLIP, which together constitute the AccessForAll specifications, and CC/PP.

• The fact that the full 1.0 AccessForAll specifications supports a wide range of potential applications beyond Content Personalisation. Hence a core profile of key elements of AccessForAll 2.0 is being developed.

• That wider developments, in the educational metadata world, offer opportunities for improved technical approaches. Particularly the recent work on the Metadata of Learning Resources undertaken within ISO to base it on semantic web technologies. This includes moving to flat rather than container based (XML) approaches exploiting semantic web techniques.

Conclusion
Disabled people are not disabled in an online world by their medical condition or impairment but by the way online systems are designed. This post has pointed to an important way in which current web technologies can be used to enhance accessibility and usability for the diversity of human beings rather that create barriers to access for some. The systems approaches to accessibility recommended here enable a move away from a one size fits all way of addressing accessibility challenges to a flexible way of responding to individual needs and preferences.

References

1. Currier, Sarah, Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008, Ariadne Project. Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/currier/

2. See: http://www.eu4all-project.eu/

3. IMS AccessForAll Meta-data Overview, Version 1.0 Final Specification, 2004. Available at: http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/accmdv1p0/imsaccmd_oviewv1p0.html

4. Composite Capabilities/Preference Profiles: Structure and Vocabularies 2.0. See: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/CCPP/

I have been a systems engineer for over 25 years now, the last 15 working on enabling technology for people with disabilities and the last 11 in education. This post relates to a systems response to accessibility and as such is applicable to the design and management of web systems mediating large amounts of diverse content to a mass audience. I have been working in international teams developing metadata standards to enable this approach since 2000. This has been largely within IMS (http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org/groups/access/). This post is adapted from a recent internal Open University report I wrote for senior management and the Enterprise Content Management project here. I use illustrative facts from the OU context but the approach has a widespread applicability. Discussion of the technical and metadata issues that impact on implementation of the use cases outlined here is outside the scope of this post. This post sets out the top level concepts and the business case.

Background notes on the OU context and its provision for disabled students
• The OU has around 150,000 undergraduate and more than 30,000 postgraduate students. 10,000 of our current students declare a disability
• The OU offers over 600 courses; all with an online presence many making extensive use of the web in their teaching and learning, some delivered wholly online
• The Open University’s style of teaching is called supported open learning
• Nearly all students are studying part-time
• Most OU courses are available throughout Europe. Some of them are available in many other parts of the world. More than 25,000 OU students live outside the UK
• A third of our UK undergraduate students have entry qualifications lower than those normally demanded by other UK universities
• The OU’s mission “Open to People” means being inclusive of the access needs of disabled students
• The OU is a longstanding national leader in provision for disabled students

Possible roles for Enterprise Content Management Systems in accessibility provision
Provision of Alternative Formats
A key role for the ECMS identified at the OU is in improving the efficacy and efficiently of the management of the provision of alternative formats for disabled students. The OU routinely provides a range of alternative versions of teaching materials to meet the needs of disabled students. These include:
• Electronic versions of printed material (PDFs, RTF or Word documents)
• Audio versions of printed or online resources (We are moving towards the provision of eBooks in DAISY format. We currently have an in-house format for this DREAM and also provide recordings on CDs or audio cassettes)
• Transcripts for video and audio assets

All of these present a common challenge in that there is a resource intended for mainstream provision and one or more alternatives that need to be associated with it. At present that association is largely managed manually. However appropriate use of metadata in an ECMS would enable this association to be managed more efficiently with a number of key benefits:

• The possibility exists then for automatically providing individual students the versions they require to meet their access needs via the VLE (Content Personalisation)
• Revisions of original assets could prompt for possible revisions required in the alternatives
• Automated auditing of the provision of alternatives at module, course and programme level would be possible
• If assets are repurposed for a different course the alternatives would automatically follow them

Information provision
A recent internal accessibility workshop under the sponsorship of senior management had the following aims:
• To reduce cost and time of course design and development
• To improve access to the curriculum for disabled students

Three of the priority areas for action listed at the end of this workshop were:

1. Improvements of accessibility information availability
2. Design approval and accessibility review to support audit
3. Long Course Descriptions to reflect accessibility

These are recognised by many staff within the OU as long standing systemic problems. Solutions to these would be strategic and are pressing. The ECMS has a role in the addressing each of these:

For 1. Improvements of accessibility information availability:
If accessibility issues and the availability of alternatives were documented in an associated document and/or the metadata of a resource then this information could be interrogated by anyone who needed it. A key use case for this would be when a prospective student who has a disability asks if a given course would be accessible for them.

For 2. Design approval and accessibility review to support audit:
The ECMS it could usefully employed in managing the documentation associated with design approval. The information referred to in 1. would also be useful in accessibility audits and to support quality assurance processes.

For 3. Long Course Descriptions to reflect accessibility:
Long Course Descriptions, the information that is made available to students and enrolment staff about a course, needs to be an evolving document as courseware is developed and edited. The ECMS could facilitate this by maintaining the association between the Long Course Description and the course assets, by providing a user friendly interface for the development of the Long Course Descriptions and by providing course audit information as already outlined.

Benefits of the ECMS in the OU Context
The ECMS potentially holds significant benefit in both the production and distribution of alternative versions of learning and other resources.

In the production process the ability to associate accessibility information with assets as they are developed and make this information available to staff across the university will address a number of key issues:
• It could facilitate prompts for the recording of this information at the point in the development process when it is known
• It would enable the aggregation of this information from all assets that constitute a course or a programme of study
• It would support the process of commissioning specialised alternative versions where these are specified by the course teams
• It would enable the efficient management of alternative activities where these are deemed a more appropriate provision than a direct alternative to the resource
• It would facilitate accessibility audits either in the production process or subsequently
• It would significantly contribute to a university wide system to enable registration and regional staff to adequately advise prospective students on the accessibility of specific courses or programmes

The storage of metadata that indicates what alternative versions are currently available for what assets and associating them throughout the production and presentation processes yields several key benefits:
• The various units that need to interact with this information can do so in an integrated and computer supported way leading to process efficiencies
• Content Personalisation for disabled students in their use of the VLE, Student Websites, etc. becomes possible
• This is also a key component of the information that needs to be made available in summary form to disabled people inquiring about the accessibility of particular courses or programmes
• This information too constitutes an important component of accessibility audits

Concluding comments
Providing effective accessibility provision at the scale the OU operates requires well designed technology supported systems and processes. The ECMS holds a significant potential to both make more efficient existing processes and facilitate new processes that would substantially improve our accessibility provision and do so in a cost effective way. The same would apply in other contexts using the web to mediate extensive resources in diverse formats.

To yield these benefits appropriate metadata specifications and technical approaches need to be adopted in the ECMS. Many enterprise content management platforms have the technical specification to enable all the benefits outlined to be yielded but they are not available “out of the box”. Thus specific development and implementation work needs to be commissioned and resourced.

Martyn Cooper
m.cooper@open.ac.uk
23 April 2009
(OU’s 40th Anniversary)

The following is based on an extract from a paper in preparation for “Computers and Education” – “E-learning, Accessibility & Pedagogy: In search of the missing tools of practice” by Jane Seale (University of Southampton) & Martyn Cooper (The Open University) – m.cooper@open.ac.uk.

The Laurillard Conversational Model
Contemporary accounts of student learning accept that it is an active process and depends on interaction. Laurillard [1] offers a model of student / tutor / courseware interaction, and this is outlined briefly here. Laurillard offers a classification of educational media based on a conversational framework (after Pask and with due deference to Socrates), which identifies the activities necessary to complete the learning process. She considers the learning process as a kind of conversation, and asserts that this process ‘must be constituted as a dialogue between teacher and student (or student and student), operating at the level of description of actions in the world’. Her classification system is based on the type of interaction between instructor and student when a particular medium is used. She classifies educational media as discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective, and raises issues about the nature of feedback, goals and control of student learning. Her review of media asserts that currently only tutoring systems and a combination of tutorials and simulations can claim to address the entire learning process as specified in her model. However her conclusion is not that these are the only worthwhile media, but that educators should consider media combinations to construct learning packages that combine complementary features. Summative and formative assessment can form one aspect of the interaction referred to in the model (although the author has predominantly used it when analysing practical work in science and engineering education, which of course in itself can be assessed). The teacher constructs the assessment, the student interacts with it and there is feedback via the marking and review process.

Figure 1 - The Laurillard Conversational Model

In her 1995 summary of these ideas Laurillard highlights how different modes of learning map onto the conversational model. For example “Learning through acquisition” (teacher as storyteller or lecturer) maps to a left to right arrow in Figure 1 from the teachers conceptual knowledge to that of the students. In assessment teacher can implement a wide range of leaning modes depending on the types of examination and question chosen. This could include “Guided discovery” that requires all the conversational components indicated in Figure 1.

Accessibility and the Laurillard Model
Key in the Laurillard Model are the various conversations it embodies. Laurillard uses these to analyse the use of media in learning. However this can be further extended to analyse the accessibility of all the media used to support these different conversations. One aspect of the Laurillard model points to practical forms of assessment where the teacher sets up something in the “real” world for the student to examine, interact and reflect upon. Practical exams are not specifically a topic of this post however there is a growing trend to make practical available as part of an eLearning context. The author led a major EU funded project PEARL [http://iet.open.ac.uk/pearl/] that argued such remote controlled labs could increase access to practical work, particularly in science and engineering subjects, for disabled students.

[1] Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching, Routledge, London

Extract from paper co-authored with Andy Heath to be presented at m-ICTE 2009 (http://www.formatex.org/micte2009/):

In the last ten years there has been a burgeoning of systems for web based delivery of educational content, activities and services. Such systems are variously referred to MLEs (Managed Learning Environments), LMSs (Learning Management Systems) and VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments). In this post the term VLE will be used generically to denote all such systems. Most universities, colleges and increasingly schools in the UK deploy such systems and the picture is similar throughout the developed world. These VLEs may be commercial products, Open Source (OS) or in-house developments. Many VLEs adopt some degree of personalisation whereby what is displayed to an individual student at any given time is automatically and individually determined depending on who they are; what courses they are registered for; and what they are supposed to be doing at that time. This post describes an extension of such personalisation approaches that considers how the interface and content appears to the student depending on their personal need and preferences for computer interaction. This has great potential to increase access for disabled people to web based education as well as catering for students that may be working in different environments (e.g. hands free in a car or in a noisy environment) or working on different devices (e.g. PDAs, mobile phones, etc.).

Work is under way, since about the year 2000, to establish a new technological paradigm for increasing access to e-Learning for disabled people that embodies personalisation for accessibility. In delivering accessible interfaces and content it is inescapable that we must somehow match together very complex content and system characteristics with very complex individual requirements. However, there are different ways to approach that matching, some of which generalise individual requirements by addressing categories of disability and what a person fitting in each category might be supposed to need, some of which generalise technical requirements in the same way and some of which address the needs of individuals in an individualised way. It has to be said that a great deal of accessibility standards work to date has been focussed around what content and system producers can do without any specific knowledge of their audience – a one-size fits all approach. This is essentially a “push” approach. WCAG 1.0 and even to a very large extent WCAG 2.0 fit firmly in that category. The approach we describe here differs because it shifts the balance and responsibility for determining access needs of an individual away from the producer, supplier or author and towards the individual end-user and their supporting technological and human agents. What we will describe is a move towards a “pull” approach. The challenges here, including the very diversity and complexity of human requirements, the diversity of technology and the difficulties of mediating between the two, requires an intermediate representation to bridge in a cohesive way.

This intermediate representation is an information model encoded in a defined metadata vocabulary. In combination two complimentary sets of metadata PNP (Personal Needs and Preferences) and DRD (Digital Resource Descriptions) are known as the AccessForAll specifications have been defined. The AccessForAll work began at the Assistive Technology Research Centre in Toronto, was developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, led to an ISO standard “Individualized Adaptability and Accessibility for e-Learning, Education and Training” and is currently being integrated with the work of the W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications group in order to integrate the matching of resources and adaptations to both personal requirements and devices. In Europe the EU4ALL project is implementing it in a framework that will be available to universities, building code that extends the VLEs Moodle and dotLRN and which will be made available as part of those Open Source efforts. We have both been involved with the development of the work since its early days in IMS (c. 2000).This effort has achieved such a standardised intermediate representation. This then has been the basis of an implementation of the Content Personalisation (CP) approach that can be integrated to VLEs. The latter is the development of the EU4ALL project [http://www.eu4all-project.eu] which we participate in; Andy and I lead the Standards and Metadata work of the project.

There is a marked distinction between Content Personalisation for accessibility approach outlined in the conference paper (to be published April 2009) and Universal Access to a single resource typified by the WCAG Guidelines. (However the two approaches are complimentary.) The advantage of the CP approach is that needs can be individually met rather that attempting a “one size fits all” approach which is often unattainable especially in an eLearning context.

In summary the development of the AccessForAll specifications/ISO standard to enable the CP implementation in EU4ALL. The state-of-the-art is such that: first prototype implementations are currently being evaluated in the project but already demonstrate the successful realisation of the approach. Key work still to be done includes: creating the Core AccessForAll profile and harmonising this with the Device Profile metadata; resolving the granularity issue and addressing metadata roll-up when resources are aggregated.

Content Personalisation holds great potential for improved accessibility for disabled people in eLearning or more generally any web based delivery context. The EU4ALL project has demonstrated an implementation of CP for accessibility and will continue to develop and evaluate this to the project’s conclusion in September 2010. We look forward to a widespread uptake of the approach given this and the sound international standards basis for the work.

I am writing a paper for Computers and Education with Jane Seale of Southampton University.  The title is:

E-learning, Accessibility & Pedagogy: In search of the missing tools of practice

The paper seeks to review the interrelation between accessibility and learning theory as it relates to eLearning.  Here I give some key points from the paper for comment if you wish.

Broadly speaking, accessibility in relation to eLearning is understood as ensuring that learners are not prevented from accessing technologies or the content and experiences offered by technologies on the grounds of their disability.

The IMS Accessibility SIG defined Accessibility, in an eLearning context, as the ability of the learning environment to adjust to the needs of all learners [IMS 2002, Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications]. Accessibility is thus determined by the flexibility of the eLearning system or learning resource to meet the needs and preferences of all users. These needs and preferences may arise from:

- their environment (e.g. working in a noisy environment)

- the tools they use (e.g. assistive technologies such as screen-readers, voice recognition tools, or alternative keyboards, etc.)
- or, a disability in the conventional sense.

Accessibility and different theories of learning
Different learning theories are chosen by different educators to underpin their teaching. A brief survey of high profile learning theories classified according to Mayes & DeFreitas is offered here and their accessibility implications discussed. There are numerous models of learning; this fact reflects that reflect the complexity of what is being modelled. Learning involves perceptual, cognitive, communicative and memory aspects of psychology and these are areas we only currently have a partial understanding of. The models selected for consideration here are principally the ones that in the authors’ experience have received some prominence within teaching at a higher education level. Further they are models that have an implication for then use of technology in mediating the teaching and learning.

A range of learning theories are reviewed and their accessibility implications discussed.  These include:

Behaviourism
Behaviourism is the School of Psychology that relates to behaviour as a central component of learning. It began with central findings of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) about the ‘conditioning reflex’. Pavlov provided the basis of behaviourism highlighting the importance of stimulus for learning. Later John Watson, an American Psychologist (1878-1958), building on the work of Pavlov outlined a whole new branch of psychology know as behaviourism, denying Freudianism and heredity and instead explaining behaviour and learning as part of nervous ‘wiring’. B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist (1904-1990) extended the behaviourist approach, describing the learning process as beginning when we are babies, then we are a black box upon which experience and conditioning are written. He developed ideas about the ‘operant conditioning’ and ‘shaping behaviour’.

Accessibility and Behaviourism
The essential implication of the behaviourist model of learning is the importance of stimulus. Now this has particular implications especially for people with sensory disabilities. How would Pavlov’s dogs learnt that food was neigh if they could not hear the bell? Now extending this to eLearning highlights the importance of providing stimuli for learning in different modalities.

Constructivism
Constructivism is a theory based upon the thinking of John Dewey, an American philosopher (1859-1952), who questioned traditional epistemology, Dewey instead came to believe that:

“…the theory of knowledge must begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an active restructuring of these conditions.”

Unlike traditional approaches in the theory of knowledge, which saw thought as a subjective primitive out of which knowledge was composed?

Further reference is made to the work of Seymour Papert, Piaget and Vygotsky here.

Accessibility and Constructivism
The key point here is that a student with disability needs full access to the environmental context of the learning.

The Laurillard conversational model
Contemporary accounts of student learning accept that it is an active process and depends on interaction. Laurillard offers a model of student / tutor / courseware interaction, and this is outlined briefly here.

Laurillard offers a classification of educational media based on a conversational framework (after Pask and with due deference to Socrates), which identifies the activities necessary to complete the learning process. She considers the learning process as a kind of conversation, and asserts that this process ‘must be constituted as a dialogue between teacher and student (or student and student), operating at the level of description of actions in the world’. Her classification system is based on the type of interaction between instructor and student when a particular medium is used. She classifies educational media as discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective, and raises issues about the nature of feedback, goals and control of student learning. Her review of media asserts that currently only tutoring systems and a combination of tutorials and simulations can claim to address the entire learning process as specified in her model. However her conclusion is not that these are the only worthwhile media, but that educators should consider media combinations to construct learning packages that combine complementary features. Summative and formative assessment can form one aspect of the interaction referred to in the model (although the first author has predominantly used it when analysing practical work in science and engineering education, which of course in itself can be assessed). The teacher constructs the assessment, the student interacts with it and there is feedback via the marking and review

In book introducing her ideas [Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching, Routledge, London], Laurillard highlights how different modes of learning map onto the conversational model. For example “Learning through acquisition” (teacher as storyteller or lecturer) maps to a teacher to student arrow in Laurillard’s diagram from the teachers conceptual knowledge to that of the students. In assessment teacher can implement a wide range of leaning modes depending on the types of examination and question chosen. This could include “Guided discovery” that requires all the conversational components.

Accessibility and the Laurillard Model
Key in the Laurillard Model are the various conversations it embodies. Laurillard uses these to analyse the use of media in learning. However this can be further extended to analyse the accessibility of all the media used to support these different conversations. One aspect of the Laurillard model points to practical forms of assessment where the teacher sets up something in the “real” world for the student to examine, interact and reflect upon. Practical exams are not specifically a topic of this paper however there is a growing trend to make practical available as part of an eLearning context. The second author led a major EU funded project PEARL that argued such remote controlled labs could increase access to practical work, particularly in science and engineering subjects, for disabled students.

Cognitive Learning Theory
Cognitive learning theory closely relates to how cognitive skills develop. This set of theories is underpinned by cognitive science and the development of psychology. While social cognitive theory owes its heritage to social learning theory founded in the1800s; Albert Bandura in 1986 wrote his seminal book: Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, which ignited social cognitive learning theory.

Computational Theories of Learning
Computational theories of learning: derive from artificial intelligence and metaphors of computer science rather than from psychology, cognitivism, or philosophy. Starting from Alan Matheson Turing the computer has been used as a metaphor for the human brain and its functioning.

A cybernetic model of learning
Cybernetics was a term coined by Norbert Wiener in his seminal book on systems theory. It is dependent on the concept of feedback which is of course central to the idea of assessment of learning.

Typically a learning activity is followed by an assessment of some form. The results of the assessment are feedback to the student who compares this with their own perception of their learning and they move through the system again either retaking the same learning object and assessment or moving onto a new learning object. The diagram is only shown simplistically with any conditional branching based on the assessment to alternative learning objects or activities omitted.

Inclusion and the Cybernetic Model
The essential implication of the cybernetic model for accessibility is that not only should any learning activity and assessment be accessible but the form of any feedback needs also to be accessible to the student.

Other Models of Learning
There are many models of learning stemming from different schools of thought. In this paper a diverse but limited selection has been made but it makes no pretence at being comprehensive. Other models of learning that are more briefly considered include:

• Situated Learning
• Action learning
  
• Andragogy
  
• Communities of practice
  
• Instructionism or instructivism
  
• Learning styles
  
• Motivation
  
• Problem-based learning
  
• Socially-mediated learning

Discussion and Conclusions
The conclusions to the paper are still being developed and discussed but cover:

• Many accessibility related tools exist, but they do not seem to be having much impact on teachers and teaching practice in further and higher education-, evidence by the fact that the accessibility of e-learning in colleges and universities is still incredibly variable;
• This variability in accessibility suggests that a different set of tools may be needed to help teachers develop their accessibility practice further;
• It is widely agreed that there is a link between effective pedagogy and effective use of technology. There may also be therefore, a link between pedagogy and accessibility. Whilst the link may be complex, it would seem to be worth exploring further, particularly with a view to ascertaining whether pedagogical tools have a role to play in the development of accessible e-learning and accessibility practices;
• Pedagogical tools are tools that mediate a teachers’ action, offering clear and detailed principles regarding learning that can be easily and readily translated into teaching practice.
• Two sets of pedagogical tools that are worth exploring further are models and theories of learning and learning design tools
• Having explored and discussed these two tool sets we conclude that they maybe useful in changing/developing the accessibility practices of teachers in further and higher education.

An extract from:
Life’s ups and downs – an autobiography of a manic-depressive
Martyn Cooper (martyn61cooper@googlemail.com)
Begun February 2009

I find it difficult to write about my spiritual journey, not because there is no clear narrative, which there certainly is, but because I find it difficult to put into words the spiritual place I now find myself. I am in a stage of my faith journey with paradox and transcendence being key spiritual growing points and symbols as opposed to words having reached a high level of importance in my spiritual perceptions. That is why it is difficult to write about my current state; the words get in the way. Having said that I will outline the current status of my personal faith.

I am a theist; I have been all my life. At points of crisis on my faith journey I have challenged every doctrine of the non-conformist protestant faith I was brought up in and have rejected or modified many of these. However never has my belief in the existence of God, a God who is creator and sustainer of the universe, been challenged. I also have believed continually in the doctrine of the incarnation in its general sense; that God is intimately entwined with His/Her creation.

So here is my Credo as it currently is:

• I believe in God, creator and sustainer of the universe. “In Him we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28]. The sustainer aspect of God’s role in the world is central to my belief. I have a model of Him/Her holding the universe together and unfolding with His/Her creation.

• I believe in the sublime virtues of Love, Beauty and Truth first exposed by the ancient Greeks but which I met in my teens in the writing of Solzhenitsyn.

• Love is experienced in relationship and thus apprehension of the love of God requires relationship with Him/Her. Many Christian theologians have argued that the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the ultimate model for relationship.

• I see the doctrine of the Trinity as a failed human attempt to explain a mystery. More is to be gained, in my view, on contemplating the mystery than explaining it.

• Faith must be practised: “Work out your faith with fear and trembling” [Philippians 2:12]. I continue to be part of a Christian community and now worship in a high Anglican church, St. Matthew’s, Kingsley, Northampton . However I can not believe that universal truth is contained in one religion. I have drawn extensively on Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and to a lesser extent Sikhism and Sufi Islam and am sure there is much to learn from other religions I am yet to explore. It is man’s arrogance and insecurity that leads any religion or believer to think that they have a monopoly on truth.

I make no mention of Jesus or any other messiah, prophet or teacher in my personal faith statement. This is not spiritual arrogance but reflects the fact that for the last 2 decades I have wrestled with the doctrine of the Trinity and the meaning of the status of Jesus as Son of God. I could quite justifiably be accused of adopting the Arian Heresy.

Arius (c. AD 250–336), was a Christian priest, who was first ruled a heretic at the First Council of Nicea. Arius lived and taught in Alexandria, Egypt. The most controversial of his teachings dealt with the relationship between God the Father and the person of Jesus, saying that Jesus was not of one substance with the Father and that there had been a time before he existed. This teaching of Arius conflicted with other Christological positions held by Church theologians (and subsequently maintained by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and most Protestant Churches).

This faith statement can all be summarised as:

“I believe in God, creator and sustainer of the universe who embodies the sublime virtues of love, truth and beauty. God is incarnate in his creation and expresses His/Her love in relationship with it. This includes His/Her relationship with mankind generically and human individuals.”

First day in the office for over a week – I can report it is still here – decorated in white!

I am currently working on a paper for “Computers and Education” entitled: “E-learning, Accessibility & Pedagogy: In search of the missing tools of practice” By Jane Seale & Martyn Cooper.

This paper has the central argument that what we are seeking to achieve in accessibility in eLearning is access to the learning not primarily access to the technology.

Here are a few highlights from that paper:

• Many accessibility related tools exist, but they do not seem to be having much impact on teachers and teaching practice in further and higher education
• This variability in accessibility suggests that a different set of tools may be needed to help teachers develop their accessibility practice further
• It is widely agreed that there is a link between effective pedagogy and effective use of technology.
• Pedagogical tools are tools that mediate a teachers’ action, offering clear and detailed principles regarding learning that can be easily and readily translated into teaching practice

Two sets of pedagogical tools that are worth exploring further are models and theories of learning and learning design tools.

Different pedagogical models have different implications for accessibility and this is further discussed in the paper.  For example Laurillard has set forward a conversational model of teaching and learning.  (See: Laurillard, D. (1993) Rethinking university teaching, Routledge, London.)  This is often used to analyse the roles of different technical features in an eLearning context.  However it can as equally readily be used to analyse where accessibility accommodations are required and their nature.

The roles and responsibilities for educators (as opposed to technicians) in accessibility has previously been discussed in another paper of mine: “Cooper M., Making Online Learning Accessible – the role of the educator and issues for the educational institution – reflections on experiences at the Open University, Association of Learning Technology Journal (ALT-J), Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 103–115, March 2006.”

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