I recently had an interesting phone conversation with Eva De Lera Tatjer and Jose Manuel Rivera López from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC, for short) in Barcelona, Spain. UOC is a completely virtual university with over 40,000 students taking courses online.

Eva and Jose are working on a project called MyWay, which involves the delivery of learning content in a presentation-independent format. I’m interested in this project because it relates to much of the work our team at the ATRC has done in the past with content transformation and personalization to improve accessibility. Eva and Jose share the feeling that accessibility should be about the ability of the system to provide an adequate learning environment for all users, rather than about a person’s particular disability. In creating MyWay, the team at UOC has apparently done a lot of user research to ensure that the user interface for their course content is useful and understandable to students. This user-centered design approach sound quite complimentary to Fluid’s own work in this area, and I look forward to hearing about their progress.

MyWay is powered by a content conversion system they call “I-Transfer.” In short, UOC has over 500 courses worth of learning material stored in an XML format that represents the structure and semantics of the content independently from how it is ultimately presented to the user. As a result of this, they are able to generate course material in multiple formats, making it easier for students to access content in the way that is most appropriate for their particular learning context. This reminds me a lot of the TILE learning object repository system we created here at the ATRC.

Here’s a quote from a document Eva sent me that illustrates their user-centered design interest and how presentation-independence can improve the experience of students:

“For example, a virtual university student that wishes to advance in her studies while commuting to work on the train will need a light weight and fit-in-the-bag format (i.e. chapter pocket book format). But she might also wish to work on an assignment during lunch hour at work for which she will need to quickly find the meaning of concepts, definitions, email the professor for questions, etc. (i.e. search-based course material), and will also want to work on her studies at night, when the children are asleep and the energy level is low and attention span barely gone. In this case, she will require a more passive yet stimulating format (i.e. a DVD format, so the user can sit down, relax and learn). In conclusion, user studies contributed to identify the above and other multiple formats that a virtual university would require to provide in order to facilitate and motivate users’ learning experience. ”

I-Transfer users XSLT to transform course material into several different output formats, including:

• Paper, including printed books in small and large sizes
• Web (HTML)
• PDF
• MP3 format using text to speech
• DAISY talking book

They also use the IMS Content Packaging format, which allows the system to automatically generate navigation schemes for their web-based content, including tables of content, navigation bars, etc. All the resulting web content is also WCAG AA compliant, and they can generate SCORM files to import the content into learning management systems like Moodle or Sakai.

When I spoke with Eva and Jose, I encouraged them to join the Fluid community and share their experiences doing user-centered design and accessibility work. I hope there may also be opportunities to share user research information and design strategies in the future as well.

If you are working on usability or accessibility-related work in academic or community source projects, I’d love to hear more about it. Drop me a line by email at colin.clark@utoronto.ca.