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GraphicInterfaceImplementationwithmoduleinLMSAmadeusProjectforDeafStudents

CONFERENCEPAPER·JANUARY2011

DOI:10.13140/2.1.2514.0807

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Graphic Interface Implementation with module in LMS Amadeus Project

for Deaf Students

Marcelo Lucio Correia de Amorim

Informatics Center – Federal

University of Pernambuco (UFPE)

Recife/PE, Brazil.

mlca@cin.ufpe.br

marcelo.amorim@gmail.com

Alex Sandro Gomes

Informatics Center – Federal

University of Pernambuco (UFPE)

Recife/PE, Brazil.

asg@cin.ufpe.br

Fernando da Fonseca de Souza

Informatics Center – Federal

University of Pernambuco (UFPE)

Recife/PE, Brazil.

fdfd@cin.ufpe.br

Abstract

With the globalization’s advent, the Distance Education has significantly improved.

Therefore, you can find the use’s dissemination of interactive systems for Distance Education

in the most different areas and with the most varied user’s profiles. This profile diversity

collaborates for the need of a bigger ease in the users interaction with a different interactive

systems. This research is a method proposition for usability and accessibility evaluation of the

LMS Amadeus when used by deaf people. On this proposal, contains the researches’ results

through questionnaire and observation with Distance Education’s students. A new version of

LMS Amadeus was evaluated. This work is the master’s degree’s study in CIn – Informatics

Center - Computer Science, in UFPE (Federal University of Pernambuco), with the goal of

interface implementation that offers the best usability for deaf students in Distance Education

on LMS Amadeus.

1. Introduction

Distance Education is one kind of teaching whose students are absentee from school.

It has its theory focused on the transactional distance, which means that students and teachers

are separated by space and time [5;10].

The Distance Education`s techniques are being recognized because they can solve

problems about time and space. From the fourth generation of Distance Education`s evolution

to today, the best quality of this kind of teaching is that it allows the knowledge from

anywhere and at any time the students wish to have. However, the students need to have a

personal computer and to be on line. Distance Education is also democratic, with high quality,

and, mainly, it is easier and more efficient to spread knowledge and researches by this kind of

teaching.

The long distance education gains national highlights becoming public policy item.

However, the most mature projects used an old Internet application’s programming

technology. The result of that technology’s use is that the interface usability is of a low

quality and the interaction’s styles possible are limited [2].

Such tools creates resistance and deviates of the wide teaching ideal proposed by the

corporate known as blended learning [11], which guides the Distance Education approach

construction from a proposition of a wide variety of interaction’s ways to reach the students

by the several learning ways: manipulating representations, listening, reading, discussing,

solving problems together.

All of formals scholars’ levels are commonly divided by three periods. There is the

one of teaching (the teachers speak and the students listen); other of interaction between

information and learning (read, discuss, understand, reflection) and the third period of doing

(many times mixing broadcasting or simulation of activity with exercises, tests and exams),

which means to use the knowledge at the exact time when it’s needed.

The use of digitals technologies for teaching can change those verticals and straights

structures (teacher – student) of interaction with information; it can also interfere with

individual and social constructions of knowledge. The digital environments offer not only

brand new places and time of interaction with the information, but also a never seen way of

communication between masters and beginners.

From the beginnings of Century XXI, the use of digitals medias for long distance

education has been being a very important fact to the Brazilians’ needs, whose education can

be the solution for social inequality through increasing the knowledge quality and getting its

access more democratic. The technology can help not only for digital inclusion, but also for

youth and professional training continued who will play the part of social changers.

Considering that one of the long distance education goals is to spread the knowledge

to as many social stratums as possible, so the teaching tools need to be appropriate for the

many users profiles. In this case, the LDE have to be able to reach the needs of those people

who are deaf by taking characteristics and concepts capable to include them into the project.

The Amadeus [1] falls in this context as an alternative created for making simpler the

job of teachers, tutors, instructional designers and students. At the same time, it increases the

numbers of creative and attractive practice without compromise the usage of its interfaces.

This research has 6 (six) sections. After the introduction, the Amadeus interface and

its mains functions will be described. Then, there will have a brief discussion about including

deaf people in the Amadeus environment. Afterward, it will be presented this research

methodology and its first products. At last, there is the first conclusion e future works.

2. LMS Amadeus

A ubiquitous platform was designed during several years of human interaction

research in the same category platform and used on the context of distance education analysis.

Beyond the fundamentals functions that give the chance for the teacher to teach and

for the student to learn, this platform has also the ability to make its practices easier. There is

no doubt that it makes the process richer and even encourages interaction and learning by

action.

The LMS Amadeus enlarges a set of experiences found out by the users in many

similar platforms.

A Learning Management system (LMS) is remarkable for the Open Source application

whose goal is to make easier the educational programs management, commonly used at

schools and companies [6; 2].

Amadeus system is one way to understand LMS idea by incorporating new forms of

interaction between users and system; users and content and users themselves. So, it is

distinguished for a collaborative learning environment, where teachers and students can

interact with the environment e with themselves, been capable to capture the partaking’s

actions and activities.

In or order to enlarge the system, we tried to take the platform out of the formation

process point and put it on the own user’s locus. Doing this, we aimed to allow the users

access and participation, make them interact with different gadget, such as: desktop

applications, mobile phones, PDA and Digital Television, games, touching interfaces (for

illiterates). This diversificated ways of contents access and for partners of a learning

community makes Amadeus a present and accessible interface seeing everywhere.

Focusing on the user at the education management, the principal element for the

platform conception lays on the capacity of arrange the usage experience that we can create

with it. But it should be given interacted and solid. The users interaction with themselves e

with contents gave by the system allow the management of news teaching strategies and

learning led by constructive theories or socially integrationist of human development.

Therefore, those are the Amadeus main features:

Simple and instinctive interface with conceived usage and developed by Web 2.0 and

AJAX technologies;

Usage of several kinds of media, since traditional chats to simultaneous discussions

between many users who are watching the same video, for instance;

Videos sharing on concurrent cooperation position;

Multiplayer’s games server providing alternatives ways of interaction with games

medias;

Controlling tests system measured at real time on internet;

Social activity caption at web interface and on several interconnected environment;

Mobile learning: ways of interaction by mobile gadgets, such as mobile phones and

PDA e

Brazilian’s Digital Television System integration.

Figure 1. The ambient LMS Amadeus

3. The Inclusion of Deaf People on LMS Amadeus project

The communication and information technology – CIT, as auxiliary tools on the

teaching and learning process, enables the student to live facilitator situations for the

development of your potential in a playful way. We live in a technological society, where

most students, even deaf ones, need these tools seeing on their learning process. For deaf

education, the ones that communicates in a visual way, the tool becomes priority.

Being in touch with technologies make people free to break out of bounders and

decrease communications problems, this happens not only because of the place for expose

people ideas given by it, but also because the use of technologies improves the way people

express their thoughts and communicate. The users get more and more relaxed and involved

turning the sociability process easier and thus their inclusion in society is guaranteed.

One of the biggest problems faced by the deaf people is not being able to express

themselves through their own writing language (sign language). That’s why they need to

speak their second language (oral language) for write, which makes harder to them to learn

because the written code of an oral language is based on phonetics - writing based on sound.

This way of learning is very painful because for deaf people the writing of a spoken language

means a reunion of nonsense symbols. To overcome writing it is necessary to know the

spoken language, what can´t happen naturally for them. That´s why deaf people are hindered

from writing researches most of times [9].

On reading, deaf people present restricted comprehension even after many years of

scholarship. Perlin says [7] that being deaf mean to belong to a world of visual experiences

and silent. Listeners’ culture is based on listening, even if there is a visual factor, such as

writing. Writing is very important for deaf because of its visual feature. Although they still

have difficulties on reading and writing because they only catch the writing from the oral

language.

Another limitation faced by deaf community is that their communication have to

happen personally, between speakers, one facing another. It happens because for deaf is very

hard to use oral language as a way to communicate.

That´s the reason why it´s important that the whole society and the scientific

community in special look for ways to include deaf to social and scholar relation, by the

development of bi-language tools that respect and understand deaf language.

Through new technologies, a new way of learning is able to be rescued and, as a

learning process ally, becomes possible to the teachers to act as mentors, whose fundamental

role is to ease the learning process, acting as a leader and stimulator of the deaf student

teaching-learning process.

Amadeus project can provide forms of communication that give a chance to information

access with several possibilities never seen before. By this platform any user can give and have

information, around the world and at any time.

In order to model in a correct way the Amadeus interfaces appropriate to the educational

process of the deaf student, becomes necessary to seek a way of transforming the instructional

teaching in a constructional teaching, since that technology may favor the construction of a

contextualized learning and potentiate the students work and productions.

It is a primordial tool for education because provides forms to the child to break out of

bounders, communicating and increasing its knowledge on a creative way.

However, Brazilian deaf community is still taken as deficient and nothing - or barely nothing

– has to provide to them, talking about brand news technological breakthrough.

4. Method

Among several methods for researches, we chose two for finding them more relevant:

the interview, that, according to Richardson [8], promotes an close relationship between the

interviewee and the interviewer, and, the observation, that results in an heuristic evaluation

[3], a process more dynamic that promotes your application in a reduced group of 3 to 7

students to perform the analysis of diverse interfaces and its usability.

Initially, we performed an interview with twelve deaf students with higher education,

aiming to understand the interviewees profile on the utilization of virtual environment of

distance education. For this, a questionnaire previously made for this purpose was used.

Figure 2. Data course from the Amadeus ambient.

Figure 3. Course modules in the Amadeus ambient.

For the data obtained with the interview’s observation, a mini course of ASL

(American Signal Language) was created, using the Amadeus platform, however it wasn’t

adapt to the participants reality, the deaf people. On the digital teaching-learning environment

videos were stored (in Libras – Brazilian Sign Language and ASL) so that the research

subject could follow the classes.

5. Results

According to the questionnaire answers of the interview with the twelve deaf students with

higher education, the interviewees experience in Distance Education is presented like this:

Three answered that had a 3 (three) year experience with Distance Education;

Three answered that had a 2 (two) year experience with Distance Education;

Two answered that had a 2 (two) year experience with Distance Education;

The rest of them used Distance Education daily or a few months ago.

During the observation, that lasted about 3 (three) hours, the evaluators, in a total of 3 (three)

deaf people received the tasks according to the Distance Education research. Those tasks consisted in

how to access a class, answer an activity, among others, following a list with the main problems and

difficulties during the environment use.

On this process, the students highlighted the following points to improve:

Simple text that is easy to understand;

Bigger source and spacing;

Pictures for words an options association;

Video classes in Libras or with a corresponding legend;

Computer help in Libras; and

Forums that allows communication trough webcam for an exchange of experience and

socialization.

With the observation results, we can realize that deaf people are able to learn easier when

video classes in Libras are used other than in written texts, because the knowledge construction’s

process for the deaf student is with visual resources, and the interaction in a visual language ease its

learn process.

This research is not yet conclusive, there is mucho more to discuss, and that’s why we

idealized de adaptation of the environment for this public, since several suggestions of improvements

arose during the process.

6. Conclusion

The distance education’s evolution was widely intensified after the globalization

advent. The virtual learning environment’s dissemination and utilization has grown in a very

intense way and, with it, several interactive systems available arise for users all over the

world. However, among this users diversity are the deaf people that also use it, but, for having

a different way of communication from the majority, they need accessibility in Libras and

adaptations on this systems.

With the research we can realize that some aspects are necessarily important for the

usability of these environments for deaf people. First, the division in thematic modules so the

learning and comprehension of the environment and the classes become easier; the utilization

of indicatives images and explaining videos in Libras; Forums of discussion through webcam

for exchange of experiences between the users and the recording of this resource.

It was possible to identify with the initial conclusion in this research that the Amadeus

environment’s standards ways of accessibility are currently ready to achieve the deaf users’

specificities, however, since it is an easier manipulation platform, both in the creation and in

utilization by students, is completely possible its adaptation for those people reality.

This project doesn’t put an end to the endless possibility for adaptation and creation of

several resources, as in avatar, a prototype in human or animal, on virtual and augmented

reality, shape that uses 3D animation with possibility of language accessibility in Libras.

Assistant Technology is any element that eases the personal autonomy or enables the access

and the use of some physical device. This technology uses augmented reality and if designed

for this purpose could promote social inclusion through assistive technology that gives

autonomy for its users or enables the access and use of some physical device.

Figure 4. New figure for this research.

The future researches proposal is to supply modules according to suggestions made by

the Amadeus platform observers, considering virtual and increased reality, with an Avatar

interpreting the video lessons to sign language for the long distance education.

7. References

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distancia/ferramentas-ead-ihc-ensino-distancia.shtml>. Accessed Set 26, 2010.

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