JISC Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments (WIDE) Project

I am delighted to find out that our proposal for the WIDE project has been successful and WIDE  is now part of the current JISC funded DVLE programme.

WIDE is a joint project between the Accessibility Research Centre at Teesside University, JISC TechDis and Portland College that aims to make online learning more accessible and inclusive for disabled students/learners.Our objective is to develop open educational resources that will improve or support the learning experience and can be shared and adapted by the community.

This project aims to explore and document the process of developing and supporting a Community of Practice drawn from existing links with the project partners to define, design, develop, evaluate and use digital resources. Through a series of workshops and follow up activities, participants will identify appropriate learning designs (digital and non-digital) derived from practice that can be re-purposed as widgets. These will be developed to produce aroun a suit of high quality widgets created for specific learning needs that conform to the learning object metadata standards for accessibility as defined by the IMS AccessForAll AccMD specification. The widgets will be classified and searchable by type, subject matter, complexity, adaptations and disability. Each widget will include descriptions of the user scenario on which its creation was based and a summary of its use in practice. The widgets will be freely available through a range of dissemination methods for use and adaptation by the wider learning community and aim to extend the functionality and flexibility of VLEs to enable institutions to meet the needs of learners with disabilities who may require their learning resources to be adapted to meet their specific needs.

This project will apply the expertise of the Accessibility Research Centre (ARC) at Teesside University, TechDis and the Portland College to develop solutions to support disabled learners. The project partners will bring together specialist teachers in teaching and technology to develop a set of specialised widgets through a series of workshops and follow up activities based on the model developed by JISC Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning in Reusable Learning Objects. The resultant widgets will be stored in a searchable repository on a Apache Wookie server hosted at Teesside University that can be accessed, downloaded and distributed by the community and evaluated by teachers and groups external to the project.

For more information on the WIDE project, visit our project wiki and theJISC DVLE WIDE page