Exploration of stakeholder needs for the ViPi (Virtual Portal for Interaction and ICT Training for People with Disabilities) portal. The ViPi KA3 LLL project (511792-LLP-1-2010-1-GR-KA3-KA3NW) has been partially funded under the Lifelong Learning program, subprogramme KA3 ICT. www.vipi-project.eu

1. VIPI – EXPLORATION OF STAKEHOLDER
NEEDS FOR THE VIPI PORTAL
ANDY BURTON, NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY, UK
KAREL VAN ISACKER, PHOENIXKM, BELGIUM
1 GEORGE MILIS, G.M EUROCY INNOVATIONS LTD, CYPRUS
Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

2. ABOUT VIPI
 The ‘Virtual Portal for Interaction and ICT Training for
People with Disabilities’ (ViPi) project is a three year
Lifelong Learning KA3 funded project, launched in
January 2011. Partners are:
 Nottingham Trent University (United
Kingdom) – project contractor
 PhoenixKM BVBA (Belgium) – project
coordinator
 Hypertech S.A. Informatics & New
Technologies (Greece)
 Steficon SA (Greece)
 VŠĮ HITECO – High Technologies for
Cooperation (Lithuania)
 G.M Eurocy Innovations Ltd (Cyprus)
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

3. ABOUT VIPI
 The ViPi project aims at creating accessible and flexible basic ICT
skills training, designed to meet the specific needs of people with
disabilities by encompassing:
 An interactive online portal with a semantically enriched repository hosting
learning objects (Web 3.0 approach),
 A social networking and community building area, both online and mobile (Web
2.0 approach),
 An online learning environment hosting SCORM (Sharable Content Object
Reference Model) compliant training courses,
 WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) compliant accessibility
 Embedded rich internet applications
 Multi-language support.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

4. INITIAL RESEARCH – LAW AND POLICY
 Research was carried out to gather information on relevant law and policy in
the consortium countries and Europe-wide
 Reveals different laws and policies in effect throughout the consortium
countries.
 Laws have been frequently revised to bring local laws into line with current
European directives
 European strategies since the Lisbon Strategy have stressed increase in
competitiveness AND social cohesion as their goals.
 I2010 strategy promoted the positive contribution ICT can make to economy,
society and personal quality of life
 The ‘Digital Agenda’ is the new initiative – lays out policies and actions to
maximise the benefit of the digital revolution for all.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

5. INITIAL RESEARCH - STATISTICS
 Statistics were gathered relating to the education and employment of people with
disabilities in the consortium countries and Europe-wide.
 Reliably comparable data for the countries was hard to get hold of
 Definitions of disability vary from country to country – giving marked differences in
the percentages of people with disabilities and their levels of employment
 Based on European Labour Force Surveys around 16% of the working age population
of Europe has a Long Standing Health Problem or Disability (LSHPD).
 Data highlights significantly lower employment in people with disabilities than in the
non-disabled population – particularly marked difference in the more severely
disabled categories. Percentage of people with disabilities in employment around half
that in the non-disabled.
 This may be due to a number of factors including:
 lack of appropriate training and support
 benefit traps in the welfare system
 employers’ attitudes
 discrimination
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

6. ABOUT THE SURVEY -
 In order to further target the curriculum, the methodology and the focus of future ViPi
work, a survey was created.
 The survey was designed as a means of obtaining data from multiple stakeholders in
the ViPi project.
 Different stakeholders would have different inputs to the survey – all of which needed
to be captured.
 The survey was therefore broken up into sections, to be completed by separate
relevant stakeholder groups of:
 Persons with a disability
 Organisations for people with disabilities
 Trainers
 Policy makers
 Intermediaries
 Presented as a seamless online survey experience (with offline version available)
 Used LimeSurvey after considering recommendations from the Web accessibility
Center ‘survey of survey tools’ available from
http://wac.osu.edu/workshops/survey_of_surveys/ 6
Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

7. ABOUT THE SURVEY - FORMAT
 The question groups were  The order of flow was
subtitled as follows: dependant on the answers to
1. stakeholder interest
2. ICT access to tools and services the initial compulsory question
3. carers and relatives on stakeholder interest.
4. ICT training and skills
5. learning preferences
6. your ViPi interest  Each individual question was
7. organisations marked up with logical rules
8. intermediaries and was only asked when
9. policy makers relevant to the current survey
10. trainers
user.
11. support networks and community
12. employment
13. personal info
14. general
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

8. ABOUT THE SURVEY
 Currently the survey is still online at:
http://www.phoenixkm.eu/survey/ in four languages.
- English - Dutch - Greek - Lithuanian
 Please fill it in if you haven’t already!
 Entries collected at 21nd September 2011
 Total completed surveys = 150
 Total surveys begun = 487
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

9. INITIAL FINDINGS – STAKEHOLDER TYPES
 Who completed the
intermediary,
13 survey:
policy maker, intermediary 13
15
organisation's policy maker 15
representative, relative/carer,
16
75 relative/carer 16
trainer, 24 trainer 24
person with a disability 35
person with a organisation's representative 75
disability, 35
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

10. INITIAL FINDINGS – RANGE OF DISABILITIES
 Disabilities of people with disabilities  Specialism of
completing survey Organisations of
survey completers
visual visual
speech speech
other other
neurological neurological
Axis Title
Axis Title
mobility mobility
mental mental
learning learning
hearing hearing
cognitive cognitive
chronic disease chronic disease
0 5 10 15 20 0 10 20 30 40
Axis Title Axis Title
 Of those who completed the survey, there was a good spread of disability
groups in both the people with disabilities and the organisations for people
with disabilities.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

11. INITIAL FINDINGS – LEARNING METHODS
 Preferred learning methods against experience of learning methods
among people with disabilities
e-Learning
Games-based learning
Groupware learning without tutor
Self learning
Tutor (virtual classroom)
Tutor (classroom)
Personal tutor (virtual)
Personal tutor (face to face)
0 5 10 15 20 25
PwD prefferred learning methods PwD experience of learning methods
 Shows that e-learning, virtual tutors and virtual classrooms are
preffered by people with disabilities but less often used. ViPi can
address this.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

12. INITIAL FINDINGS – ICT TRAINING CONS
 Information and Communications Technology training problems
experienced by people with disabilities…
I had insufficient basic knowledge to complete the training
I had difficulty getting to the training site
The training environment was unsuitable for people with my needs
The software version was different to the one I am used to
The operating system was different to the one I am used to
The duration of the training was too long
The trainers lacked experience of working with people with my needs
The training was too basic
The cost of training was too high
The price of the required software was too high
The duration of the training was too short
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
 ViPi can address the top three problems experienced by people with
disabilities, by making training for open source software free – and
allowing users to work at their own rate.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

13. INITIAL FINDINGS – ICT TRAINING PROS
 Aspects of Information and Communications Technology
training people with disabilities are happy with…
The software used was inexpensive or free and easily available
Similar hardware and software was used as is available at home
The training environment was suitable for my needs
The training site was easy to get to
The trainers were experienced in my needs
The training was aimed at the right level for its target audience
The trainers were experienced with the technologies
The training was reasonably priced or free
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
 ViPi can in fact satisfy all of the above criteria. Open source software
training can address the low acceptability of inexpensive/free software and
similarity between home and training software.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

14. INITIAL FINDINGS – AT TRAINING CONS
 Assistive Technology Training problems experienced by
people with disabilities…
The duration of the training was too short
The trainers lacked experience in working with people with my needs
The price of the required software was too high
The cost of training was too high
The training was too basic
The software version was different to the one I'm used to
The operating system was different to the one I'm used to
I had insufficient basic knowledge to complete the training
The training environment was unsuitable for people with my needs
The trainers were unaware of how assistive technologies interact with the
operating system
The duration of the training was too long
I had difficulty getting to the training site
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 14
Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

15. INITIAL FINDINGS – AT TRAINING PROS
 Aspects of Assistive Technology training people with
disabilities are happy with…
The trainers were experienced with the technologies
The trainers were experienced in my needs
The software used was inexpensive or free and easily available
The training environment was suitable for the needs of people …
Similar hardware and software was used as is available at home
The training site was easy to get to
The training was aimed at the right level for its target audience …
The training was reasonably priced or free
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
 Again ViPi – in parallel with the new 2 year ATLEC project (Assistive
Technology LEarning through a unified Curriculum – commencing
January 2012) can provide an optimal AT training package for
people with disabilities
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

16. INITIAL FINDINGS - SKILLS
 people with disabilities who expressed a preference
thought these skills would enhance their employability…
Internet browsing
Use of social media
Use of internet services
Email and communications
Web development
Programming
Databases
Use of office suite
0 5 10 15 20 25
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

17. INITIAL FINDINGS - EMPLOYMENT
 Jobs people with disabilities think they could take on…
Retail
Caregiver
Trade
Clerical
Arts
Human resources
Communications
Management
Professional
Information technology
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
 Information technology is top of this list suggesting ICT training would
be highly useful to people with disabilities.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

18. INITIAL FINDINGS – TRAINING AND PEDAGOGY
 Preferred pedagogic
The top 8 pedagogic approaches (amongst
approaches are well trainers)
supported by proposed ViPi Discussion
Drill and practice
33
33
portal. Presentation
Tutorials 27
32
 Presentation, tutorials and Collaboration 26
Demonstration 26
demonstration are the core Interaction 25
approaches to teaching that Games based learning 25
Motivation 22
will be applied Case studies 19
 Drill and practice is well Field trips 19
Debate 19
supported in a games based Facilitation 18
learning approach Role playing 18
Simulations 14
 Discussion, interaction and Exhibits 14
Modelling 12
collaboration are supported Story telling 10
by Web 2.0 support Generative development 7
Apprenticeship 6
 Games-based learning will be Other 0
used in the learning objects 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

19. INITIAL FINDINGS – EXPERT OPINION
 Of all experts in people with disabilities (Organisations for people
with disabilities, Trainers, Intermediaries and Policy makers) the
majority (83%) think that ICT training will ‘improve’ or ‘vastly improve’
the ability of people with disabilities to find employment.
It would not make them any more employable.
It would improve their employability a little.
It would improve their ability to do certain jobs.
It would vastly increase their chances of finding a suitable job
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011

20. VIPI SURVEY
 Just to reiterate: The ViPi Survey is still online.
If you have not filled it in – we invite you to do so!
http://www.phoenixkm.eu/survey/
English - Dutch - Greek - Lithuanian
 Thank You! The ViPi KA3 LLL project (511792-LLP-1-2010-1-
GR-KA3-KA3NW) has been partially funded under
the Lifelong Learning program, subprogramme KA3
ICT. This presentation reflects the views only of the
 Questions? author(s), and the Commission cannot be held
responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein.
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Interactive Technologies and Games: Education, Health and Disability
Nottingham Conference Centre, 25th and 26th October 2011