Di Iorio, A., Feliziani, A. A., Mirri, S., Salomoni, P., & Vitali, F. (2006). Automatically Producing Accessible Learning Objects. Educational Technology & Society, 9 (4), 3-16.
Automatically Producing Accessible Learning Objects Angelo Di Iorio, Antonio Angelo Feliziani, Silvia Mirri, Paola Salomoni and Fabio Vitali Department of Computer Science, Università di Bologna, Via Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40126 Bologna BO, Italy
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT The “Anywhere, Anytime, Anyway” slogan is frequently associated to e-learning with the aim to emphasize the wide access offered by on-line education. Otherwise, learning materials are currently created to be used with a specific technology or configuration, leaving out from the virtual classroom students who have limited access capabilities and, in particular, students with special needs. On the contrary, accessibility of learning materials is a key issue to ensure a whole inclusion of people with disability in instructional process, and, consequently, to prevent risks of “digital exclusion”. The foremost explanation for the creation of not inclusive materials is the assumption that creating accessible and universal Learning Objects (LO) is a dismaying and lengthy task, partially supported by complicated ad-hoc tools. New simple mechanisms that drive authors in creating accessible LO are needed to enlarge LO audience; they should contemporary support students’ needs (while reading) and reduce authors’ efforts (while writing). In this paper we present a LO creation and management process, based on common personal productivity tools, which guarantees both content accessibility as well as universality and offers a simple and friendly interface to authors.
Keywords Accessibility, Authoring, Standards compliance, Content creation
Introduction Tools ease of use for e-learning contents creation has been always paired with the continuously raising expectations about the quality of the final result. Although nowadays many sophisticated tools to create elearning contents can be track down, authors’ job is increasingly complicated by new quality requirements. Two main principles have contemporaneously to be addressed, which conjure to make e-learning authors’ job once again difficult and full of technical issues to be tackled: 1. Accessibility: producing fully barrier-free learning contents is one of the key issues to meet the goal of an inclusive “knowledge society”. Accessibility, with full and authoritative backing from standard bodies such as the W3C and national governments through laws and norms, further raise the bar for web authors. 2. Portability: conformance to e-learning standards enhances contents portability and is recognized as one of the fundamental aspects to preserve contents value. Specific e-learning standards guarantee that compliant contents could be used in several learning systems. Existing tools, because of several different reasons, still fall short in providing a full authoring environment, both capable of dealing with all the appropriate technical aspects and, at the same time, as easy to use as normal desktop applications such as word processors or presentation applications. As a consequence of such a lack, an additional professional figure is required to step in between the educators and the final e-learning system, which assists the authors in creating final learning objects t satisfying all modern technical requirements. How should the ideal authoring tool be, in order to fully assist educators in creating accessible content for modern Learning Management Systems? What kind of support could we build for users that do not really want to deal with all the technical details of current e-learning technologies? We have identified at least seven dimensions: 1. Ease of use: the tool should be at least as easy to use as existing word processors and presentation tools. In particular, it should behave as similar as possible to their work so as to lower its learning curve. 2. Ease of re-use: the tool should help and assist authors in reusing and converting documents and materials they have already prepared in past times by using any of a large number of desktop tools, to the new elearning platforms.
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Ease of editing and updating: whenever the authoring process starts with a conversion step, it oftentimes becomes a one-way process that cannot be repeated at will, but it costs money and time and requires expertise to be done several times. The conversion process raises difficulties in regularly editing and updating the published material, and constrains users to directly edit the converted material rather than the source documents which were originally used before the conversion. Standards support: the tool should generate learning objects that can be read by a large variety of commercial and open source e-learning platforms. It practically means that such a tool should produce learning objects according to some major e-learning standards, defined by different standardization organization. Visual Homogeneity: the tool should produce content that easily undergoes platform- and site-specific styles and look&feel, by fully and easily adapting any content to the templating and styling locally mechanism adopted. Universality: the tool should generate content which under appropriate conditions (e.g., the choice of different and independent templates), can be fully and at best quality displayed on a wide variety of applications, including non-dominant versions of browsers and operating systems, older versions of browsers and operating systems, new and emerging hardware devices (such as PDAs, cellular phones, interactive TV sets, etc.). Accessibility: the tool should create fully accessible content according to international standards and national laws. It should fully assist the author, silently generating the accessible structures that can be automatically deduced from existing content, and prompting the author in providing anything cannot be automatically generated (e.g., the textual description of images).
Accessibility is of paramount importance, especially when dealing with e-learning applications: learners with disabilities can benefit a great advantage from e-learning, not simply because it allows distant and flexible learning activities, but mainly because it could support impaired students in overcoming barriers to resources which would otherwise be hard to access (Salomoni et al., 2004). In particular, learners with difficulties in accessing to printed materials (i.e. people with visual impairments) can take a great advantage of the integration of digital materials into teaching practice. Across the world, laws are in place or under definition to ensure that interactive/on-line services and, sometimes, specifically e-learning, are made accessible to citizen with disabilities (Italian Parliament, 2004; U.S. Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998, 1998). Two main strategies, combined together, are used in order to meet accessible requirements: ¾ Appropriate use of W3C standard compliant technologies, in order to enhance interoperability and portability (World Wide Web Consortium, 2000; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999b; World Wide Web Consortium, 2001b). ¾ Use of alternative versions of inaccessible content, in order to accommodate different users, e.g., students using limited or obsolete devices and/or students with sensorial impairments (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2002b; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999a; World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c). In this paper we present a methodology and some tools for the creation and management of accessible and universal learning objects (LO) which considerably improves the process across the seven mentioned dimensions. Our methodology involves different tools, from widespread text editors, which are used by authors to easily produce content, till an ad-hoc application, called ISA-BeL, designed and implemented to support automatic production of standard compliant e-learning materials. The process has been widely used to publish about 40 learning modules which are currently in use by our University for several e-learning activities in a number of subjects. Accessibility of the whole process and all the produced LOs have been verified on the field. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some background information about authoring e-learning content platform. Section 3 introduces the creation and management process in e-learning contexts using ISA-BeL, while section 4 fully details a use-case in producing accessible and standard e-learning materials by using ISA-BeL. Finally, Section 5 provides some conclusions and suggestions for future works.
Background Systems and standards Many recent efforts in the field of knowledge management address e-learning, i.e., distance learning based on the use of personal computers. Systems providing e-learning services can be divided in two main categories: LMSs (Learning Management Systems), which are web-based platforms by actually providing content to the users and LCMSs (Learning Content Management System), the authoring environments used to create learning 4
objects. The main features of an LCMS are related to the content management, from the production to the storage including reusability and distribution of content. On the other hand an LMS manages the administrative functions (i.e. users’ activities logging and curriculum management), the distribution of contents to learners, and the tracking of the learners’ experiences and assessments. A relevant role is played by existing e-learning standards, in ensuring interoperability and reuse of didactical materials. Main interoperability specifications have been developed by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), with a specific working group, the Learning Technology Standards Committee, which is working on e-learning standardization (IEEE LTSC WG12, 2006) and IMS (Instructional Management System) Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2006). A relevant role is also played by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2006), which has developed a de-facto standard called SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c), based on some specifications previously defined by IEEE-LTSC and IMS. It is structured in modules defining sub specifications. In this context let us introduce two SCORM modules: 1. The Content Aggregation Model (CAM) defining the structure of learning material, and describes it with metadata (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a). 2. The Run-time Environment (RTE), a JavaScript Application Programming Interface (API) able to deliver real time information about user actions (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b) to a LMS or a LCMS. Learning Object Production An interesting field in e-learning research is the simplification and automation of the learning objects production: some works can be found in literature which are devoted to automatically produce LOs starting from available didactical materials (created in many different formats), or by directly generating SCORM-compliant contents. Several projects and products provide authoring tools for e-learning materials (4system, 2006; Macromedia, 2006; ReadyGo Inc., 2006; SumTotal Systems Inc., 2006). They commonly imply high-level technical skills in order to be appropriately used by authors, which have typically to complete a preliminary training phase to effectively use them (as they can do with well-known “productivity tools”) These products generally provide authors with different interfaces and functionalities so that they can create e-learning materials, manage resources, aggregate contents, add meta-data, and so on. Some of these tools are free, while some others are commercial products. In many cases, the use of these new tools cannot be fully appreciated by authors of e-learning materials, who may prefer to rely on well-known productivity tools, which could allow them some savings in time and money. Products and platforms are designed by moving onto in this direction and they generate e-learning course materials starting from well-known productivity tools, such as Microsoft Word (Horizon Wimba, 2006; Serco, 2006). The main advantage in exploiting such products is that no learning and training phases are needed. On one hand these tools provide a too rigid structure in drawing up created contents, on the other hand they keep authors’ stylistic choices, instead of maintaining only designers’ ones, invalidating accessibility and usability principles. In addition, they do not support useful mechanisms to manage DTD configurations or allow the insertion of new structure style. One of these products (Horizon Wimba, 2006) provides a partial support to accessibility of created contents, but, in some cases, generated LOs are not compliant to international guidelines and laws, denying actual benefits to learners with disabilities. Another interesting issue in e-learning course contents creation is the design o Generative Learning Objects (GLOs) (Boyle et al., 2004; Bradley et al., 2004; Morales, 2005). The underlying idea is based on the division into two different parts the LOs creation. The first one consists of building a Learning Object Template (LOT), while the second one is devoted to adding the template a subject specific content. The LOT encloses the deep general structure of the e-learning course. Once a template has been created, authors and/or tutors can add different subject specific contents, i.e. the surface structure, so as to produce Learning Objects which fit the specific fields of the discipline. Finally, let us consider a new way to think intermediate data format that is promising to have an interesting impact on LO production. Microformats (Microformats.org, 2006). Microformats are a set of simple open data format standard which are developed and implemented for more/better structured web microcontent publishing. Some already developed microformats specify for example formats for calendar and events data. Many other microformats are currently in a developing phase. In (Downes, 2006) authors propose Microformats use in elearning, by conceiving it as a network phenomenon, so as to facilitate a personal e-learning centre design.
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Accessible and personalized Learning Objects Other academic projects and works are devoted to produce accessible e-learning contents and/or to personalize them. One of these proposes the design of a prototype (Gabrielli et al., 2005; Mirabella et al., 2004) which drives authors in creating accessible didactical materials. The authoring interface of this prototype is developed in Java and its main aim is to support authors’ job with suggestions and examples. They are provided in order to show and explain how accessible contents have to be produced by providing appropriate and equivalent alternatives to learners and according to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c). In (Kelly et al., 2005), the authors propose a holistic approach for addressing e-learning accessibility which takes into account e-learning usability of pedagogic issues, student learning styles and needs and some other significant constrains which usually accessibility guidelines do not cover. The main aim of this work is showing how the whole quality of e-learning contents can be assured by using this approach. Open Adaptive Learning Environment (OPAL) 0 is an e-learning service, which considers the personalization of e-learning course contents and is based on the delivery of personalized contents. The personalization is done on the basis of students’ cognitive and presentation learning preferences by using aggregation models based on SCORM (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c). Another interesting academic project is ELENA (Dolog et al., 2003; Dolog et al., 2004), which supports personalized access to distributed learning repositories. The approach to customization employed in this project takes advantage of semantic Web technologies and metadata description standards, such as LOM (IEEE LTSC WG12, 2002) and IMS AccessForAll Meta-data (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2002a). In addition, it adapts and customizes access, delivery and consuming of learning services and LOs on the basis of rule-based matching of contents and learners descriptions. No one of the above described projects and products combines accessibility issues with methodologies to automatically produce LOs, like the ones described in Section 2.2.
From content creation to e-learning delivery Context: the A3 Project Teaching basic computer knowledge is becoming a matter of big interest in a lot of fields, particularly in Universities, where in every degree course is necessary to certify a minimal skill in computer knowledge. For this reason, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna has developed a project (called A3, Accessible Learning Environment (University of Bologna, 2004), “Ambiente Accessibile d’Apprendimento” in Italian language) for the creation and fruition of contents taking in a particular account the training structure uniformity, a low management cost, and a little effort in resources and time consumption for the process startup Main requirements related to LOs used in A³ are due to: ¾ Accessibility and Web standard compliance. The project was developed and carried out inside an Italian University and it respects the Italian Law on Information Accessibility, the so called “Stanca Act” (Italian Parliament, 2004). In particular, as requested by the Italian Law about Web accessibility: (i) all templates completely separate presentation from content and structure, by producing XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS 2.0 code, (ii) layout and font dimensions are relative, and (iii) foreground and background colors are compliant to W3C requirements. ¾ Portability of LOs and e-learning standard compliance. Learning objects produced in A³ are package SCORM 1.2 RTE compliant (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b), so that contents can be imported in every LMS (Learning Management System) SCORM compliant. The Italian Law about accessibility (Italian Parliament, 2004), analogously to the WCAG 1.0 (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c) requires contents and services to be provided independently from the use of scripts and programming objects. This means that a complete use of SCORM is not possible in respect of the current set of Italian (or W3C) requirements, and specifically, only the SCORM-CAM (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a) standard has a complete compatibility with accessibility specification. Otherwise the SCORM-RTE (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b) module, devoted to Real Time activities, is completely based on the use of Javascript and it is not compatible with the (current) accessibility requirements. Let us note that both the Italian Law (near to adopt specific requirements on e-learning) and the WCAG (near to version 2.0) will be updated in the next future to allow Javascript and it will permit a full use of SCORM (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006).
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Architecture Producing usable, accessible and universal content is a complex and time-consuming task that, in most cases, still requires expertise to the authors. All constrains derived from A³ requirements presented in the previous section exacerbate this condition. The basic idea to overcome authors difficulties, which is proposed by A³ was based on developing a chain of tools, called ISA-BeL (Di Iorio et al., 2005), which allows users to easily create accessible and portable learning objects (LOs) by mainly using a word processor (or, more generally, a productivity tool). Thus, ISA-BeL does not require authors to know technical details of e-learning technologies and languages, to master complex LCMSs or to use potentially complicated ad-hoc tools. ISA-BeL author writes a document of raw content and he/she indicates the role of each fragment (by using styles according to a set of given guidelines), and the conversion engine transforms each fragment in a proper element of the final learning object. Actually, information about the whole output structure as well as some metadata are required, but inserting such data is really simple and fast, as we will discuss later. A three step workflow can be now defined, from knowledge creation to e-learning provision: 1. Authoring (Content creation), done by teachers using a word processor (or alternatively a different personal productivity tool, such as a presentation application).The output of this phase is a set of documents in common formats like rtf, doc, ppt, sxw, etc. containing accessible learning materials. 2. Producing (Content transformation), i.e. the process creating a LO from a set of documents produced during phase 1. The output of this phase is a LO which has to maintain accessibility features embedded in original documents. 3. Delivery (Content distribution), the real e-learning service, provided by a LMS which guests the LO which is produced in phase 2. The LMS has to guarantee accessibility of content and service provisioning. The whole process is depicted in Figure 1, which also shows the content production step performed by ISA-BeL and described in the Section 3.4 with more details. The output of ISA-BeL is not a simple set of common HTML pages, but a group of several alternative contents, which are used to enhance portability and accessibility, such as: 1. Learning Objects, compliant to SCORM-CAM 1.2 or 1.3 (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a); this version can be uploaded on a SCORM compliant LMS and provided to students throughout the Web. 2. Web-based materials, to be distributed on-line on the Web or on an optical storage device (CD or DVD) or to be delivered through the Internet. 3. Printed materials in PDF format, obtained from the original contents by using XSL Formatting Objects (World Wide Web Consortium, 2001a).
.doc
Word Processor
.htm
ISA
.xml
BeL
LO
LMS LMS
Web Contents
HTTP HTTP server server
ISA-BeL PDF
AUTHORING
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Figure 1. Authoring-management-provision of accessible e-learning by means of ISA-BeL
Authoring The ISA-BeL support for content creation consists of providing users an alternative and simplified way to express all the data and content useful to create learning objects. Focusing on the resources packaging (even if the whole project we are working on currently supports tracking, run-time monitoring and assessments management too), a learning object can be defined as a set of structured resources supplied with a (SCORM) manifest that describes them. 7
From this definition, we figured out alternative mechanisms to (i) indicate which pages compose the learning object and which content elements compose each page, (ii) verify these content elements express all the required information and (iii) add metadata associated to the learning object. We have provided many facilities to sustain contents creation also by authors which are non-expert in technologies and standards concerning accessibility and usability issues. In particular for accessibility, we supply authors with MSWord styles which are accessible with a custom toolbar. Each style is meant for a specific role in the final document; the role could regard a particular required accessibility constraint or a predefined semantic position in the text. The correct use of styles according to their implicit semantics is managed by some macros which alert the author about lacks of information. Moreover, the author can use a Word embedded form to fill in specific metadata. An ISA-BeL author, in fact, writes his/her contents by using a word processor, and he/she assisted by three different tools, specifically designed to cover these three aspects: ¾ An authoring toolbar which offers a fast access to him/her main activities such as defining presentational aspects and structural elements, inserting accessibility related information and so on. A screenshot of the ISA-BeL toolbar is depicted in the following Figure 2. ¾ A verification toolbar which runs automatic controls over the respect of accessibility and universality constrains. For example, some exploited controls are: have any image an alternative description? Has any table a summary? Are titles used according to the correct hierarchical structure? Other manual controls are made by the post-production team (about foreign language words, acronyms, abbreviations, and so on); if the LO does not respect such constrains then authors have to correct and control contents again, before starting the production phase. ¾ A set of forms to collect SCORM Metadata. As expected, a key role is played by the SCORM metadata: while some of them can be derived by the system (last-saved date, file size, language, version number and so on), other information have necessarily to be provided by the authors. A step-by-step description of author activities, from creation to production is detailed in the following Section 4.
Figure 2. The ISA-BeL authoring toolbar (in MS Word) Production The production process is performed by an ad-hoc application, ISA-BeL which is composed of two modules: ¾ ISA (Immediate Site Activator): a conversion tool which actually transforms document from the word processor format into an intermediate XML representation, enriched by all the necessary metadata. An introduction about ISA architecture and functionalities can be found in (Vitali, 2003). ¾ BeL (Backed e-Learning): a stand-alone application which gathers all the information stored in the intermediate XMLs, creates the SCORM structures (in particular the tracking scripts and the manifest file) and merges the content into a single .ZIP file, by processing the output of ISA. BeL also integrates into the LO a (multimedia) recorded accessible video lecture, which is automatically transcoded through a different line of the LO production. More information about this transcoding process can be found in (Salomoni et al., 2005). The production process is based on a set of templates and configuration files which are used to define structural aspects as well as layout and graphical aspects of the automatically produced LO. Delivery The system has been used for the above mentioned A3 project. Contents which were produced by the automatic process are loaded on the e-learning platform by means of standard (for SCORM compliant contents) import procedures. Our choice has been made between the large number of open-source platforms and after a deep 8
testing period we have adopt ATutor platform (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, 2006). The choice has been driven by the built-in usability support even though it has been necessary modifying the platform to adapt it to the Italian Law on accessibility (Italian Parliament, 2004) which is narrower than the Canadian one. Accessibility of the adopted LMS partially guarantees that produced contents maintain accessibility features and ensures accessibility and portability of services (chat, forum, news). Some modifications were needed to completely meet the “Stanca Act” requirements, and particularly the constraint to use Strict (X)HTML code. The main delivery of A³ was through the LCMS, but ISA-BeL produces also a printable version and a fully HTML one (which could be distributed both on the Internet and on a CD/DVD).
Simply creating an accessible LO This section offers a detailed description of creation and production phases, by presenting a step-by-step description of author activities. Let us consider a specific scenario inside the A³ Project, in which the author uses MS Word to create contents that are written in Italian to introduce some basic IT skills. In particular, our author has to structure a lecture on “Digital Documents” through 6 sub-modules about different aspects of the main topic. Each sub-module is created by generating a .doc file which includes its contents. In order to complete the LO production, the author has to: ¾ Prepare the 6 files, by creating the sub-modules content with MS Word. The module is completed with some other .doc files containing scope, goals and references. ¾ Verify the structure of the produced contents, file by file. ¾ Add the SCORM Metadata. ¾ Obtain the .htm version of each file, by using the “Save as” option of the “File” menu which is provided by MS Word. ¾ Use the ISA online tool to produce the set of XML intermediate files. ¾ Use the BeL online tool to compose and produce an accessible LO. This sequence of activities is fully described in the following. Creating contents Let us suppose to work on the sub-module about “Digital Images” which starts with a general description of vector and bitmap formats. At the beginning of his/her work our author writes the title of the first page of the section (in Italian “Bitmap e Vettoriale”) and uses the “Title 1” style to format it. The page is based on a short explanation text describing this specific topic and the author uses the authoring toolbar to add a suitable format to it. In order to complete his/her exposition, the author adds a figure showing a bitmap and a vector image and compares the two data representations. Such an image has to be formatted by using the “image” style, available through the toolbar. The image needs a short description that will be used as a caption and a longer explanation which completely describes the information embedded inside the image. This description will be provided to blind students and to students that access to didactical contents through a non visual browser. Both the descriptions are identified by using the appropriate styles, and specifically: ¾ the “short description” style, associated to a button on the toolbar, and ¾ the “long description”style, associated to another button on the toolbar. The style “Short description” automatically appears after each use of the style “Image” in order to suggest the author a correct use of styles. Analogously, the style “Long description” appears after each use of the style “Short description”. The page is closed by opening a new one, e.g. inserting a section break; this task could be performed by using the appropriate MS Word menu option or by activating a related button. The final result is depicted in the following Figure 3, showing the final layout of the page inside the MS Word editor. The author completes the sub-module by creating a sequence of pages, similarly to that one described above. Appropriate mechanisms to format and structure contents are also provided to insert tables, terms in foreign languages, animations and all the other elements that can be included in an A³ module.
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Figure 3. The page created with MS Word Verifying contents Some of the actions due to obtain a universal and accessible content could be forgotten by the author that sometimes prefers to write a fast draft and improve it by adding additional information later on. The system provides a verification toolbar, depicted in the following Figure 4, to support the author in controlling the correctness and completeness of his contents.
Figure 4. The verification toolbar With the verification toolbar, the author can control the syntactical respect of all the guidelines which guarantee universality and accessibility of the learning materials. A typical control verifies the presence of the required description of images; in this case, two different alerts are provided (as depicted in Figure 5): ¾ An error, every time a short description is missing. The short description corresponds to the alt attribute of the img tag and is required to guarantee the accessibility of graphical information, thus the absence of a short description it is considered as a heavy error (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c). ¾ A warning, related to every missing long description. The long description is needed for complex graphical contents (e.g. charts, graphs, etc.), which need additional descriptive information to be understood by blind people or by people accessing with no-graphical browsers (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c), e.g. Lynx (Lynx Project, 2006).
Figure 5. Alert messages The automatic control can catch only syntactical errors, such as a missing description. It is substantially impossible to automatically ensure the description will be adequate to the image. Other constraints to the structure and the accessibility of contents could be activated through the verification toolbar such as the hierarchical use of nested headings and the presence of summaries for data tables.
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Adding SCORM metadata The interface for this step has been designed according to the above mentioned approach: giving users the possibility of completing their tasks without having to learn new technologies and tools. A form directly integrated into Microsoft Word allows users to add the required metadata. The SCORM metadata (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a) have been classified into different groups, based on the author competency and the importance of each single data. We have identified three main roles in the process of content authoring: the lesson author (writing single units of content), the module author (collecting single units into a compound) and the editor (assembling the final LO). We have selected the relevant metadata and we have created specific interfaces for each of these roles. Moreover, we put the most important fields onto the main form and the other relevant fields in an advanced form, so as to simplify the author’s work. An example of the SCORM interface in ISA-BeL is shown in the following Figure 6.
Figure 6. The form for Meta-Data Producing the LO Once the SCORM meta-data were inserted, the creative work of the author is completed and the production phase begins. In complex organizations (such as, for example, in the Project A³ staff) this phase is performed by a post-production team. Three actions have to be performed in sequence: 1. The author has to save each file by using the “Save as” option of the “File” menu provided by MS Word to obtain an .htm version. This phase depends from the used word processor and it is unnecessary for some specific tools, i.e. Open Office Writer (OpenOffice, 2006). 2. Each of the .htm needs to be transformed into an intermediate XML format by using ISA represents fragments of raw LO. This cleaning process transforms the presentation-centered HTML automatically produced by MSWord in a valid XML file which correctly separates presentation and structure. Such a XML includes some HTML tags used with their implicit semantics to structure its content. Each file contains a portion of final LO content of the while presentational elements are completely removed. Figure 7 presents the ISA on line interface allowing the user to process single files or a .zip file containing all the fragment that compose a LO. 3. Finally the set of files processed by ISA are sent to the BeL system which offers two main functions: (i) to compose the LO by sequentializing the content defined by each single .xml file and (ii) to add all the elements needed for the provisioning of a Web content (i.e. presentation and navigation). Figure 8 presents the ISA on line interface that allows the user to process single files or a zip file containing all the fragments composing a LO. 11
Figure 7. The ISA on line interface
Figure 8. The BeL on line interface The authoring and producing phases are now completed. The LO has to be loaded onto a LCMS to be browsed. In A³ scenarios such a platform is a personalized instance of ATutor (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto, 2006). Figure 9 shows the page created during the process we have detailed above stepby-step as it is rendered on the Web. Accessibility evaluation Accessibility of e-learning materials which has been produced by the above mentioned tools has been widely tested by involving a group of people with disability in verifying on-line contents and services. Universality of materials has been tested by using different browser running on different platforms and specifically: ¾ MS Internet Explorer 5.0 and later (Microsoft Corp., 2006), ¾ Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and later (Mozilla Project, 2006), ¾ Netscape Communicator 7.0 and later (Netscape Communications Corp., 2006), ¾ Lynx 2.8.4 rel. 1 (Lynx Project, 2006), ¾ IBM Home Page Reader 3.0 (IBM, 2006), and finally ¾ Apple Safari 1.0 (Apple Computer Inc., 2006). There are two obvious considerations about such an evaluation. First of all, we have exclusively considered accessibility from a technical point of view. Pedagogical issues, including those ones on learning styles, are out of the scope of our tests. Secondly, all LOs were controlled once loaded onto the LCMS to be properly browsed. Furthermore content produced by our process is compliant to all the constraints considered by the Italian Law on Web Accessibility (Italian Parliament, 2004), meeting also WCAG 1.0 AA level (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c) and Section 508 (U.S. Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998, 1998) requirements.
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Figure 9. A page as it’s rendered by a LCMS Finally, accessibility of the whole process has been verified by involving in authoring and reviewing tasks blind people using the screen reader JAWS, versions 5.10 and later (Freedom Scientific, 2006). The accessibility of the process itself is both a complex and a crucial objective, which creates the basis for a true inclusion of people with disabilities inside LO production teams.
Conclusions and future works The need for simplicity in knowledge creation and sharing has been a basic concern in the international elearning community. This paper presents a content creation and management process allowing authors to easily produce accessible and portable LO by using personal productivity tools (e.g. a word processor). The proposed system meets the seven main goals, listed in Section 1: it permits author to simply editing contents, by starting from zero while reusing existing materials. The tool supports the best know conciliation between e-learning standard and accessibility guidelines, so as to guarantee portability through LCMS together with the respect of WCAG (AA level) and of the Italian Law on accessibility. Finally, such an high accessibility level is itself an assurance that our process produces LOs which are compliant to main Web Standards based on an uniform and simple presentation style. Compared with literature, our approach combines the idea to automatically process contents to produce SCORM compliant LOs (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c) with the growing need to meet accessibility requirements in e-learning (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2002b). Main future work is devoted to extend the functionalities of the system, by offering supports in creating more complex contents to the authors (such as rich media contents and conceptual maps) by ensuring accessibility and universality of the results together with simplicity of usage.
Acknowledgments This work was partially funded by MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research) and was supported by CRIAD (www.criad.unibo.it). Authors want to thank Lorenzo Donatiello, Simone Martini, Marco Roccetti, Nelda Parisini and all the colleagues that supported this work with their precious suggestions. Finally authors want to thank ASPHI Onlus Foundation (www.asphi.it) that supported tests with users.
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