Results
- Summary
- Learners' experiences as ICT users and related accessibility guidelines
- Benefits of ICT use for people with learning disabilities
- Risks of ICT use for people with learning disabilities
- Support and Mediation
- Factors influencing adoption and implementation of the Learning Environment for personalisation and person-centred practice
- Conclusions
Summary
The research highlighted the following regarding the terms on which people with
learning disabilities can participate in e-Learning and the Web:
- People with learning disabilities demonstrate diverse, unorthodox and complex patterns of behaviour as ICT users, sometimes without direct observable correlation between apparent intellectual impairment in daily life and ICT capability. This finding permeated all aspects of the research and specifically informed a review of aims to develop a taxonomy of user behaviour with which to inform developer guidelines.
- A pivotal role is played by supporters, facilitators and mediators in the type and quality of ICT use by this community
- Competing professional, institutional and policy agendas, alongside resource constraints, mitigate against good ICT practice at the institutional and classroom level, which has implications for the implementation of an LE, particularly as a tool for self-advocacy, and for its delivery of personalised learning.
Learners' experiences as ICT users and related accessibility guidelines
Findings strongly indicated that despite a number of barriers and constraints, ICT contributed to self-concept, inclusive communication, and self- determination for people with learning disabilities. This is discussed in detail in Bunning et al. (submitted) attached. Positive value was attributed to ICT options by nearly all of the research participants, although some difficulties were elicited both from interviews with learners and teachers, and from controlled experimental work, with regard to ICT usability.
The research highlighted that the very complexity of ICT use by this community, coupled with its supported context, defied classification by a discrete taxonomy. Thus, we revised our aim of creating a taxonomy of user behaviour to inform Web accessibility guidelines. Instead research data was analysed and developed into a set of 'techno-biographical personas'. These consist of short edited clips from the video ethnography with narrative accounts of behaviour and practices exhibited by ICT users highlighting issues for design and use of ICT-based material for this community. The set of 'personas' establishes a more appropriate means of intervention than the Project's intended taxonomy, as complex and unorthodox use of systems is a more significant issue for consideration regarding accessibility for this user group than establishing progressive scales of difficulties or abilities.
Benefits of ICT use for people with learning disabilities
The inclusive communication benefit for people with learning disabilities lies in multimedia's potential to bypass conventional linguistic code and support user engagement with what has been referred to as the 'natural semantics' of visual imagery, sound and repetitive user action . This creates the conditions for a range of communication and engagement opportunities that are potentially amenable and offer reinforcement potential to people with learning disabilities. ICT use was seen by researchers to help forge connections with peers, support and teaching staff, families and even distant relatives.
ICT contributes to user's 'self-concept', helping to establish an inclusive identity in the wider context of mainstream culture, particularly through the Web. Learners used the information resource of the Internet to affirm their personal allegiance to popular forms and cultural icons that helped them to shape and represent their identities. They collated images in personal collections, as do typical mainstream teenagers, to share their likes and preferences with peers, family and staff. The screen itself was seen to assign special value to the individual's self image, as personal pages helped give individuals the same 'kudos' enjoyed by their fellow Internet-active teens and music, acting or sporting heroes. This process helped to establish personal narratives that contributed to the construction of an included social identity.
Lack of reliance on conventional linguistic forms was observed to have a significant effect on the individual's self-determination. Here the use of cameras and computers provided opportunities for a degree of autonomy not otherwise available. For example, an apparent lack of ability to make value-judgments by one participant, restricted to saying that computers were 'good', seemed to be transcended at the workstation where, in his use of computer games he demonstrated the ability to self-direct the terms of his engagement. Similarly, most learners demonstrated individual pride in personal ICT and multimedia skills.
Risks of ICT use for people with learning disabilities
Despite the benefits outlined above, the research highlighted risks associated with ICT use for this community, specifically around their activities seeming inappropriately infantile. The project found a significant shortage of multimedia available that provided suitably simple and accessible design for users with learning disabilities on 'age-appropriate' themes. On occasion, teenagers were assigned software developed for Early Years with which to work unaccompanied as a strategy to occupy and pacify some learners who might otherwise disrupt the class. Left unattended, they were observed engaged in perseverant, 'pointless busy work' with infantile content, affirming an immature self-concept and experiencing isolation from the social dynamic of the classroom. This reflected the lack of 'age-appropriate' content available. It also however, appeared to be a function of a deliberate class management approach, a 'software cosh' applied to tackle severe challenging behaviour. Identification of these risks reinforced perception of potential benefit of personalisation to match appropriate resources to learners.
Another key risk identified was that use of ICT to evidence learner achievement or represent their personal choices, could lead to the simulation of active participation despite learners' minimal or superficial engagement with an activity. Over-assistive support was seen to 'evidence' achievement without real learner engagement or learning and self-advocacy benefit. Indeed, the role played by supporters to enable those with learning disabilities to engage with ICT use was seen to be a significantly influential factor for the value of the user's experience and the benefits accrued.
Support and Mediation
For all users, particularly those with more significant disabilities, effective use of ICT appears to be inseparable from the quality of support given by teacher, assistant or peer. This is consistent with the 'interdependence' that characterises so many aspects of daily life for people with learning disabilities. The graduated partnership between learner and supporter at the workstation has been observed as constituting the 'make or break' of effective system use for those with learning disabilities and the wider agendas and environmental issues of supporters have been seen to radically shape the way in which the LE has been adopted and implemented.
Researchers observed exemplary patterns of support by teaching staff and assistants, and identified a tangible set of applied skills in communication, advocacy and person-centred practice, required to realise the potential benefits of ICT use for learners. Conversational analysis revealed a range of support approaches – from exemplary support and skilful use of communication to poor practice where patterns of misuse of technological systems are evident. Phenomena that appear to play a significant role in the mediation of service user participation in ICT activities include:
- use of pause to allow for cognitive processing of activity demands and individual need
- process of repair and address of any difficulties encountered in ICT activities, e.g. selection and use of facilitation cues by helper to support user engagement with ICT activities
The need for supporters not only to understand the communication strategies of people with learning disabilities but also to use their own communication skills in a way that is flexible and sensitive to the needs of the learner at any point in the activity was highlighted. Where practice was suitably informed, ICT could provide a context for communication between learner and supporter in which the pupil and their achievements, however small, were clearly 'centre-stage'.
Ultimately the centrality and quality of the supporter roles for ICT users with learning disabilities has meant that the wider agendas and environmental issues faced by teachers, support staff and their managers were seen to determine the character and the quality of the experience for the user community. This has been especially highlighted around the Project's objectives to implement personalised learning and person-centred practice in the school and college settings where the system was trialled.
Factors influencing adoption and implementation of the Learning Environment for personalisation and person-centred practice
The Project's efforts to institute personalisation made demands on educational practitioners' time that were clearly hard to meet. Preliminary training to use the system required release time for key staff. Similarly, once trained, some staff were unable to meet the demands made on their schedules to set up and maintain student profiles and assign appropriate learning materials. Staff absence and recruitment problems led to crisis management and subsequent LE implementation delays.
The research showed significant discrepancy between developers' and practitioners' perceptions of educational aims, which also influenced system adoption. Practitioners wanted on the one hand less sophistication in terms of personalisation and on the other considerably more complexity regarding the LE's potential for assessment management and reporting features. The capacity of the system for target setting, progress tracking and personalised content assignment were deemed less valuable by some teaching staff than the potential for automatic generation of evidence and reports to facilitate their record keeping obligations. This reflected the professional pressures experienced by teaching staff, exacerbated by an imminent Ofsted inspection in the school site during the trial period. It was however observed that the use of the LE for evidencing in this way did enhance the involvement of the learners in the process.
The developer's vision for the LE was that user records, hitherto confined to filing cabinets in the staff room, would be dynamically integrated into the LE and so feature more explicitly in the day-to-day delivery of lessons. This was intended to provide the opportunity for teachers, assistants and learners themselves to engage with a more relevant experience of individual goals, progress and achievement. In practice, some staff expressed the wish to assign the same content to the class as a whole, implying that individual learning plans were less a feature of daily lesson delivery than anticipated.
Another issue was that teachers did not adhere to single proprietary Schemes of Work but instead cherry picked from different systems, including those developed in-house, in a way that the system was not designed to accommodate. A compromise had to be found by mapping in-house schemes to common standards. Another mismatch was around targets which were often very basic in the participating institutions, but more complex in the standard schemes of work that informed the LE. The system, designed around awarding body standards originally identified by the trial institutions, was therefore not fully compatible with the actual informality and D.I.Y. culture of the special education provision.
Further barriers were encountered because of the shortage of sufficiently varied content for learners with disabilities to enable a tight match to diverse student needs. A personalised system demands a spectrum of subtly differentiated learning objects but the special education market was seen to lack the required quantity and array of content. In a similar way, our efforts to differentiate between different learners according to their use of assistive and augmentative devices within the learner profiles was based on an over-estimation of adoption and awareness of these technologies in our trial sites. This was indicative of a general weakness in the ICT provision at both trial sites, exacerbated by poorly trained and over stretched support staff and a perceived institutional prejudice in the FE setting, where the Supported Learning Unit was, according to some staff, given second class support by the institution's technical staff who prioritised services for other mainstream classes.
The person-centred aims for the LE were similarly subject to tensions between self-advocacy and educational agendas. The e-Portfolio feature of the LE, which was designed to enable learners to establish their own albums of rich media content with which to self-advocate and enhance their communication capacity, was not used as intended. Rather, it became a vehicle for the evidencing of student educational achievements for records of educational progress.
Staffing constraints also meant that practitioners were unable to provide the one-to-one ratios required to achieve the individual attention to learners that self-advocacy demands. This was further complicated by a lack of understanding and expertise in advocacy, communication, person-centred practice and the social care issues of transition amongst some teaching and support staff.
Of particular importance was the tendency found in some staff implementing the LE to prioritise outcomes over process, due mainly to the pressure to evidence achievement. The ever present agenda of evidencing learner's educational attainments as part of quality assurance procedures appeared to conflict with a supported learning process, the latter being harder to measure. Researchers witnessed teachers taking photos for learner's 'Personal Passports' on their behalf without consultation, capturing learners' 'personal choices' on the basis of the staff team's perceptions of their likes rather than through an inclusive exchange with the learner in which preferences were encouraged to surface with the aid of the technology.
Efforts to adapt system design to accommodate the most disabled learners were also countered by recognition that teachers themselves were inclined to exclude less able learners from ICT use altogether, rather than grapple with the cost and expertise associated with the use of highly specialised augmentative and assistive technologies required to include them. The pragmatic argument was not to develop system features for users who were actually left out of the equation in existing classroom practice. As a result, the LE does not prioritise the accessibility needs of more significantly learning disabled users as much as the project originally intended.
Conclusions
Project @pple set out to explore the terms on which people with learning disabilities can access and participate in the range of opportunities presented by e-Learning and the World Wide Web. The research has affirmed that those terms include institutional, professional and policy factors which inform the implementation of inclusive and person-centred practices in school and FE contexts.
Preliminary evaluation of the characteristic use of ICT by people with learning disabilities appeared to reinforce the project hypothesis that personalisation of learning materials and person-centred practices could be achieved to the benefit of the user community in educational settings. The project met its aim to deliver a multimedia Learning Environment tailored for this community although its full potential was not realised for learners within the project schedule due to the set of factors outlined above. One of the successes of the project has been its mapping of these barriers and constraints, a process that will provide a set of clear pointers for further research as well as a checklist of issues with which future product development can engage.
In practice, in a textbook case of what STS calls 'interpretive flexibility', researchers observed that interpretations of the technologies' potential were debated and contested by developers, practitioners and users throughout product development and implementation. Evaluation of this dynamic process highlights the need for training, support and system design to engage with the 'actual' (alongside the 'potential') experience of practitioners and users and their partnerships in relation to ICT application. It would seem appropriate, for example, to accommodate practitioners' professional demands and anxieties regarding monitoring and record keeping in future development designed to exploit the person-centred benefits of ICT for learning disabled users, so that both agendas might usefully co-exist. Project @pple has started to map the set of potentially conflicting issues that will require negotiation to realise the potential of e-Learning and the Web for this community. This can help achieve sufficient confluence of personal, professional and policy agendas so that ICT can be used to genuinely improve the quality of life for the people with learning disabilities 'at the centre' of our work.
