When adopting or creating LMS online courses, imagine yourself as a student. The whole idea of online courses is centered around convenience and usability for all learners.
Convenience is crucial in the online education world. Students can access an LMS course from any computer, without requiring special software. Course assignments, tests, and activities can be completed at a student’s leisure, any time of day and anywhere. With the growing number of places providing Wi-Fi–and various projects throughout the country that are working to create city-wide free internet–LMS online courses are optimally flexible to learners’ busy schedules.
LMS providers like Coggno offer a range of user-friendly tools. Students can watch videos, simulations and screen recordings. They can complete comprehensive tests and assessments interacting with a simple interface. Using Web 2.0 programs like discussion forums, blogs, and wikis, students can interact with each other and develop a sense of group dynamic and community, which is often key to learners’ success.
These are just a few possibilities that your LMS online course may provide students. But what about special learners such as the visually-impaired? For visually impaired students, many of the exciting features available in an LMS online course can be tweaked.
Ergonomics, the science of designing technology according to human needs, has led to useful and fascinating developments not only for people with disabilities, but for everyone. The ease with which people interact with an LMS can be facilitated by ergonomic accessories.
Various kinds of keyboards that make life easier for users include expanded, miniature, and chorded (with one key per digit per hand) keyboards. There are also large print keyboards with high contrast colors, such as black on yellow. Sticky keys, Clicklock and Togglekeys (two Microsoft Windows features) are still other assistive technologies that make online learning more accessible to all people.
A computer system used to artificially create human speech is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system turns normal language into speech.
Though many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the 1980s, and despite their increasingly mainstream status, TTS systems have a long way to go in terms of sophistication. Clarity of voice is generally the measure of a synthesizer’s quality, but other challenges the programs face include the task of keeping up with the world’s growing vocabulary—new words, names and places.
The ability to verbally communicate with a program adds a new dimension to an online course experience, and may be the key to accessing and interacting with an LMS online course for visually-impaired people.
Other exciting LMS features for visually-impaired people are audio tools like Coggno’s Apple Podcast Producer. Podcasts are another increasingly mainstream medium, because of their convenience, sharing ease, and the creativity they allow. Podcasts can be used in an LMS online corporate training platform to provide and reinforce learning material; record lectures, interviews, and discussions; and act as announcements, updates and reminders for LMS students.
Podcasts are easy to create, produce and share, and learners do not need an iPod to listen to them. Podcasts are normally in the form of mp3 files, meaning they’re accessible to all learners. Indeed, accessibility for people with disabilities means accessibility for everyone. The greater variety of features you use on in your LMS online course, the greater ease with which your students learn.
————–
Coggno.com offers a wide variety of online training courses.
