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5.  » WIDGaT: A W3C Widget Design Authoring Toolkit

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5.  » Learning & teaching innovation grants
6.  » WIDGaT: A W3C Widget Design Authoring Toolkit

The focus of the WIDGaT project is to support the production of widgets that meet the needs of learners with disabilities who may require their learning resources to be adapted or personalised. 

The project team (Accessibility Research Centre, Teesside University) have already established a body of research on accessible personal learning environments, learning object adaptation services and supporting staff in the creation of accessible learning resources. 

The WiDGaT toolkit (Design Decision Maker, Authoring Tool and repository) will support the education sector in the self-design and development of open source, W3C standard widgets. The toolkit will enable staff or students without technical expertise to design, develop and share widgets that can support the personalisation of learning. It will enable the creation of widgets that contribute towards the realisation of Adaptable Personal Learning Environments and address particularly (but not exclusively) the needs and preferences of disabled students. We will utilise existing JISC tools and projects where possible to extend our existing Community of Practice (see JISC WIDE project: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/distributedvle/wide.aspx ). This project aims to explore, design, develop and evaluate a WIDGaT toolkit that will support the design, development and sharing of widgets by those directly involved in the teaching and support of disabled students. Following on from the successful JISC WIDE project (http://arc.tees.ac.uk/wide/), we will build on our established Community of Practice and utilise the JISC Users and Innovation Development Model (UIDM) approach to the specification, design, development and trial of the prototype. By engaging pedagogical and technical experts in the design and development of e-learning support with our intended end users the objective is to produce a prototype authoring tool that will enable teachers or students to develop and share bespoke widgets. The WIDGaT toolkit will contribute towards the personalisation of learning for individual students, complement existing JISC initiatives in the area of personalisation, e-learning tools and the commitment to open access and sharing of tools and resources. Both the toolkit itself and the resultant widgets will be freely available through a range of dissemination methods for use and adaptation by the wider learning community.

The objectives for the WIDGaT project are to:

• Engage with and develop our Community of Practice to produce user centred solutions.

• Develop an open source prototype authoring toolkit with source code and tools freely available to the educational community.

• Support staff in meeting the needs of disabled students.

• Host the WIDGaT  toolkit and WIDER repository and database on ARC servers

We will develop a solution that is: 

• Equally effective for mainstream education (HE and FE)

• Can potentially be used by staff and students

• Supports sharing, re-use and adaptation

The WiDGaT toolkit will be a freely available, open source, application that can be downloaded, adapted and hosted by any HE or FE institution or individual. It will support the creation, adaptation and sharing of open source, W3C standard-compliant widgets. WIDGaT will take users through the process to easily produce a widget of direct value to their learners. It will comprise a kind of expert system – the Design Decision Maker to specify the requirements for the proposed widget, an authoring tool with templates and libraries of API’s and services, a packager and a database for storage of designs and widgets.