Slide 1: Moodle accessibility
Making the Moodle e-learning software more accessible Techshare 4-5 October 2007 Dr Nick Freear Dr Chetz Colwell
Slide 2: The Open University
• Campus in Milton Keynes, 50 miles from London. Founded 1960s. • Mission "open to people, places, methods and ideas" • Only university in the UK dedicated to distance learning –"supported open learning". • One of the largest universities in Europe – 150,000 undergraduate students, 30,000 postgraduates. • 1 in 20 of our students declare disabilities.
Slide 3: OU disabled students
• Students may have more than one disability • 1. Fatigue/pain 22% … 6. Sight 5% (exclude other) • Total 20154 Figures for August 2007 Fatigue/Pain Mobility/Physical Mental Health Other Manual Dyslexia 4361 Sight 3239 Unseen disability 2695 Hearing 2065 Personal care 2123 Speech 1876 Autistic Spectrum 1039 793 777 752 375 59
Slide 4: Moodle
• Course management system, virtual learning environment • Social constructivist pedagogy – learner as teacher, interaction, observation • Open source – GPL licence, free to modify, run. – like Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox browser • Founded: Martin Dougiamas, Perth Australia (school of the air, PhD project) – Moodle 1.0 2002
“Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment”
Slide 5: Moodle.org course page
Slide 6: Moodle (2)
• Modular: course formats, activities, blocks, question types, filters, languages, themes, authentication …(20) • Default includes: assignment, blog, database, forum, glossary, quiz, resource, wiki … • 25,000 registered sites, 176 countries (10 million users, 1 million courses), 75 languages, 3000 download/day. • Universities, colleges, schools, government, companies, independents. • Community, Moodle.com consulting, worldwide partners.
Slide 7: OU and Moodle
• Adopted Moodle October 2005; live with 1.6 Beta April 2006. • Currently running OUVLE 1.5/ Moodle 1.8 (PostgreSQL). • A big installation: 395,000 users, 2900 courses! • We're involved: Roles & Permissions, Quiz, Accessibility, Groups, offline Moodle, e-Portfolio • Also, OpenLearn uses Moodle; Platinum IMS Global Learning Impact Award 2007.
Slide 8: Accessibility evaluation
• Ongoing expert evaluation since February 2006 – All available tools – Long list of issues – still being addressed in each major release of Moodle • Student evaluation – 3 rounds of testing with disabled and non-disabled students (Dec 06 – Aug 07) – Observational sessions using ‘think aloud’ – Realistic tasks in educational context – Tools included Course web site, Forum, Wiki, Quiz, Profile
Slide 9: Student evaluations
Slide 10: Problems & solutions
• Moodle 1.6, June 2006 – Some ALT text, headings, layout tables, colour contrast, list markup, breadcrumb navigation trail • 1.8, March 2007 – Adoption of forms library to standardise forms • Adding form labels and markup (ongoing) – Removed deprecated tags, text editor keyboard shortcuts, not using colour/format alone, lists, Javascript, English help
Slide 11: Open University course page
Slide 12: Progress: lists, headings …
Slide 13: Solutions (2)
• Moodle 1.9, due October 2007 – Fixing form markup – Adding list markup – Replacing mis-used markup in help files – Course resource links, miscellaneous issues
Slide 14: Issues outstanding
• Moodle 2.0, mid 2008 – More removal of layout tables – More forms markup – Headings, lists in some modules – Text editor
Slide 15: Challenges
• • • • Retrofitting Size/ complexity (1 million lines of code) Accessibility of user generated content Raising awareness of issues & techniques – 3rd party modules, themes, language packs
Slide 16: Acknowledgements
• Open University colleagues • Moodle.com including Martin Dougiamas, Jamie Pratt • Contributors on Moodle.org forums
Slide 17: Useful Links
• Open University: http://www.open.ac.uk • Accessibility in Educational Media team: http://iet.open.ac.uk/aem • Moodle Accessibility Specification: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle_Accessibility_Specification • Moodle accessibility wiki: http:// docs.moodle.org/en/Category:Accessibility • Moodle development accessibility notes: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Accessibility_notes • Moodle community: http://moodle.org • Moodle consultancy: http://moodle.com
Slide 18: Contacts
• Dr Nick Freear, Technical Developer, Learning & Teaching Solutions, N.D.Freear@open.ac.uk • Dr Chetz Colwell, Project Officer (AEM), Institute of Educational Technology, C.Collwell@open.ac.uk
