Originally published here.

Educational technology has long been recognized as a powerful and effective enterprise for teaching and learning.Recently, the convergence of new technologies supportingsocial media [1], Linked Open Data (LOD) [2, 3], andBig Data Analytics [4] along with current researchin distributed learning theories (e.g., behaviorism,cognitivism, constructivism [5, 6], and the flipped classroom [7]) promises to fundamentally reshapethe next generation of educational solutions [8]. Theincreasing interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) sometimes described as a “tsunami ineducation” has also fostered valuable discussionsregarding the role of technology in education [9].In this paper, we acknowledge these previous effortsand use them to motivate our own research. However,we focus on the use of educational technology applied toa particular context: vocational training for people withdisabilities (PwD).

This scenario involves a wide range of  barriers that are not just restricted to the school or work environment. PwD struggle every day to be integrated intosociety. They face many challenges that affect how theylive, from access to proper education, to urban mobility,to missing skills, and lack of job opportunities, toname a few. We recognize that there is a large bodyof contributions regarding technology applied to PwD (e.g., [10, 11]) and, to a lesser extent, to vocationaltraining [12].

However, there is still a need for moreinvestigations and studies in this field [13, 14].This work is part of a long-term project that has been partially funded by the Brazilian Funding Authorityfor Studies and Projects (MCTI/FINEP/FNDCT, i.e., Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação/  Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos/Fundo Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico). As mentioned,the goal of this project is to understand the role that technology can play in improving vocational training for PwD.

In particular, our research aims at designing anddeveloping new educational and social engagement technologies to facilitate the qualification and inclusion of PwD in the labor market. Our methodology includes theuse of iterative user-centered design (e.g., for requirementsgathering, iterative prototyping, and user evaluation) anda hands-on approach to develop mobile educationalsolutions.

We started with community studies to investigatethe needs and limitations of particular groups of PwD. Theresults we obtained from this process and, more recently,from a qualitative study using a popular MOOC platform,led to a better understanding of some demands andchallenges faced by PwD. In the long run, we expect that the lessons learned throughout this process can be realizedin a vocational training platform, bringing increasedusability and accessibility for everyone and not only for PwD (e.g., universal design principles.

In this paper, we presented the early results of our effortsin a long-term project toward the construction of a platform supporting vocational training for PwD. Previouswork on this topic is relatively scarce, especially for developing countries, so a requirements engineering process based on exploratory experiments was essential.We conducted experiments with proprietary technologiesand an open educational platform to explore the interactionof people with different disabilities with technologicaltools.

These field works allowed us to better understandthe reality of PwD in the learning context and to identifyseveral features that we intend to incorporate in a platformsupporting vocational training for them.Our results reiterate directives presented in the literatureregarding content personalization for scholar education, but alternatively, we suggest that because of the lack of existing data, the role that instructors currently play in thistask is still indispensable and should be emphasized.

Therefore, we propose the use of features such as tags andnonlinear course structures that can be reused and adapted.Scalability can be reached by crowdsourcing, which has proven to be effective in our experiments. So far, we believe that both features are suitable for displaying proper content in a semi-automatic manner; however, the samefeatures can also be used in a fully automatic way whenenough data is available.Since we focus on vocational training, which mainlyinvolves procedural tasks, we also believe that evaluationsteps are fundamental.

If the platform is able to responddifferently according to the student’s input at a givenassignment, it can properly be used as a technologicalsupport during vocational training sessions, which is our main goal. Moreover, we reemphasize that sendingexecution data to the instructors can represent valuableinformation to adapt the courses that will be created next.In future work, we intend to report on theimplementation and on the practical application of the platform outlined in this paper.

Further implementationand usability issues are likely to emerge from real-worldexperiments involving people with other types of disabilities, so we believe that our list of features is verylikely to be extended from the upcoming experiments.

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