Transforming
learning for
today’s
‘one in ten’

As recently as 20 years ago the hurdles faced by people with dyslexia were barely recognised or acknowledged. Now, dyslexia is the most common learning impairment registered with further and higher education support services, but its official recognition hasn’t yet translated into universally high standards of dyslexia-friendly learning provision.

Educational experiences are still largely driven, delivered and assessed by words on paper. That means it plays to the strengths of people who are fast at reading and writing – areas where dyslexics usually struggle. But today’s technology means it is a simple matter to teach in ways that are more dyslexia-friendly – and often, these will also be more appealing to many other students.

It’s recognised that dyslexic students often have very highly developed spatial awareness and visual intelligence, so simply providing hand-outs and other information in more visually appealing formats, with diagrammatic representations of information and imaginative use of fonts and colours, can really help. So, too, can offering information electronically so that individual students can easily adapt it to their own needs by changing the fonts, background colours and type sizes.

That doesn’t mean always striving to give students material ready made in their own preferred formats: teaching students to be independent and develop adaptive strategies of their own will pay dividends for them, both while they study and when they move into employment.

Jisc TechDis advises on technologies for inclusion, much of its work focuses on ways to make better use of mainstream resources and creative use of free and open source tools. Alistair McNaught, a senior advisor with the service, says that: “many learning providers channel a lot of money into helping dyslexic learners overcome barriers that needn’t exist in the first place. Inclusive practice is often simply about using what you already have, but using it better. For example, it takes two minutes to teach a tutor how to use inbuilt heading styles in Word but once they do, two mouse clicks will give an instant interactive overview of the whole document, saving time for every reader and improving their understanding of what the hand-out is about.”

Better use of technology gives us massive scope to improve comprehension. According to Alistair, few learners or staff realise that later versions of Word have text-to-speech built in. All that is needed to realise its potential is a decent synthetic voice that doesn’t sound like a robot – and TechDis’s Jess and Jack, funded by BIS, are available for all post-16 English learning providers and their learners for personal download.

He is keen to stress the ease with which learning providers can speech-enable their resources – documents, e-books and web pages. “Every post-16 learner in three of the four UK countries has an entitlement to free high quality text-to-speech, but it’s still the case that students and teachers often aren’t aware of that. And this is not about a specialised way of learning that’s just for people with learning impairments – it’s a practical tool for everyone, enabling people to learn while they’re on the move, or making the tea. The basic text-to-speech tools are free and the commercial ones add great value at competitive prices, yet it’s still the case that a minority of learning providers have it available across their networks, or promote it to learners.”

He said, “One issue is that many tutors lack confidence in technology – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is desperately needed but it has to be properly focused. IT training for teachers should be about differentiation and skills development – giving learners a chance to take responsibility, self assess, be creative and play to a range of learning preferences. It’s not about big budgets or IT experts, but about more creative use of simple tools.”

Once the basic teaching resources are sorted, says Alistair, teachers can use contact time more imaginatively to develop understanding, rather than simply to transmit content.

“Using that contact time better might involve role-play, debate, drama etc. At this very simple level technology allows us to free up contact time for different and deeper learning activities.”

And a growing number of new free tools and services are now becoming available. Two recent projects managed by TechDis include Azzapt and Navitext. Azzapt allows users to set reading preferences (font size, colours, audio etc) and then get any document delivered to their laptop or mobile devices in their preferred format, while Navitext is a comprehension tool that provides navigable headings in a document and summarises key words in sections and paragraphs. These tools are valuable for everyone, and they offer particular benefits for print-impaired learners.

This law student involved in the pre-launch testing for Navitext made a comment that was typical: “If I needed to get information from a particular paragraph Navitext had the function of going to that specific paragraph and summarising for me what that paragraph was about – it won‘t take as much time.”

Everything that has been said so far is about text and about consuming information. What happens when learners seek to create content?

Alistair says; “When people create things, they play to their strengths. They use the tools that suit them. Mobile phone pictures dropped into a Word document or PowerPoint with a bit of narration can be the basis for media-rich, creative and collaborative learning.

“We need to bear in mind that no single approach will work for everyone. But we can use content creation tools that are designed to minimise barriers, such as the University of Nottingham’s Xerte Toolkits project – an open source content creation tool that allows tutors with even modest technology skills to create interactive and mobile-friendly resources with high native accessibility. And we can help teaching staff to discover the treasures that already exist so that they can mix and match resources as the learner needs them.

“Harnessing technology and using it to teach differently, and better, is a strategy that will have far-reaching implications. While there is no legal obligation for a tutor to teach well, there is a legal requirement for them to make reasonable adjustments to ensure they do not discriminate against learning impaired students. Any learning provider that minimises their legal risks by improving the inclusiveness of their teaching practices will end up also teaching better. And that’s a win-win if ever there was one.”