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Activity 4.1 Challenges that are most relevant to my own particular context

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Edited by Elena Kondyli, Monday, 13 Sept 2010, 21:30

Common to all post-compulsory education

  • There is a clear need to find an effective way to gain access to all different kind of information provided to disabled students (either this is online or not)
  • Disabled students need time to adjust to the new setting and be autonomous in their learning.
  • In turn, teachers, tutors, designes, supporters etc should be informed whether there are disabled students in their class in order to be able to provide them with the necessary support and help if they need it.
  • Reading, writing, watching a video, hearing a recording might be a barrier to some disabled students and other students with learning difficulties.

Learning disabilities affect learning skills such as spelling, reading, writing, speaking, listening and social skills such as memory, attention, organisation, processing speed, reasoning and focus.

Specific to campus-based courses

  • The infrastructure of the buildings should be build with the necessary provisions for disabled students, like a physical access for wheelchair users, thus there is a need to have the same in the lecture rooms and residential areas.
  • Lecture theatres might need hearing loops.
  • When a lesson is fully offered to the students face to face, without recording the lecture, or have short breaks withing the course or offer transcripts to disabled students then it is a problem when you do have disabled students in your class.
  • Many people-students when they see a disabled student they are provocative and prejudiced against them.

Specific to online learning

  • There might be expensive equipment/hardware for disabled students in order to have it to assist them.
  • More time is needed from disabled students in order to acquire the information, process it and produce a result asked from a question.
  • If a website is not accessible or it does not have the necessary navigational buttons then it is a barrier for disabled students (design problem).

Related to particular subjects or contexts

  • Maths.
  • Foreign Languages due to the different accents.
  • Science due to the experiments made and if a student's mobility is limited then the student will not be able to participate.
  • Physical Education in which students with limited mobility will not be able to participate fully.
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