This presentation explores the potential for learning and academic analytics in improving the accessibility in e-learning systems and in enhancing support for disabled learners:

• The accessibility focus here is on identifying problems of access to learning systems (VLEs, etc.) for disabled students.  (By extension, learning analytics could possible identify other interaction issues that widely impact on learning for any student.)
• Enhanced support for disabled students could be achieved by both extending the general benefits of learning analytics to disabled students and in focusing dedicated support for them.

Several use cases are outlined in order to make the argument for learning and academic analytics as a set of tools in these areas. Ways in which these approaches could be technically achieved are outlined.  Then issues highlighted that will need to be addressed if these approaches were to be deployed at enterprise level.

There will be a discussion of accessibility metrics that highlights ways in which a learning analytics approach offers some advantages over traditional accessibility evaluations against standards such as W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).

Biography:

Martyn Cooper is a Senior Research Fellow, in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET), at The Open University in the UK.  His academic background is Cybernetics and Systems Engineering.

He has a B.Sc. in Cybernetics & Control Engineering with Mathematics (from Reading University). So far he has managed to bypass all higher degrees. (It took him 12 years to get his Bachelors degree!).

His research focuses on:

• applications of new and emerging technologies to enable and empower disabled people
• effective access to a wide range of technologies by disabled people

MartynCooper-SoLARStormOct2012.pdf