[Athen] Help for student with hearing impairment

[Teresa Wells Haven]

Hi, Stacy.  I have two thoughts, one of which might help sooner rather
than later, and one that your online course department should consider:

1) Materials being used in the course should be accessible, and the
department producing the DVDs in the first place should be made aware of
this.  Sure, you could always be asked to transcribe the materials
afterward, but it would be better if they were providing captioning or
transcripts up front.  What if the student were Deaf instead of HOH?
The best source of transcripts is always the professor who produced the
lecture in the first place, since there will be less chance of
transcriber error.

2) I addressed a similar situation just the other day for a student who
is an FM-system-user.  We placed the microphone of the FM transmitter
directly in front of the computer speaker, turned the speaker volume up
to high, then let the student use the FM receiver to listen to the audio
track of a streaming video that was required in her foreign language
class.  The student could control the volume on her FM receiver and hear
it well enough to catch a lot more than she had been.  It still isn't
perfect (because the original audio track didn't capture everything
clearly), but it's better than what she was hearing, which was next to
nothing.  

I haven't actually tried it, but I wonder if you could use a stereo
patch cable to go directly from the line-out on the computer to the mic
jack on the FM transmitter?  I'd want to test it before trying it on a
live student, of course, but I would think it might work...  I didn't
try this solution for my student because the prof still had to be able
to use the mic during class for lecture in between showing the video
clips.

Hope this helps,
Teresa

Teresa Haven
University of Arkansas

-----Original Message-----
From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On
Behalf Of Stacy L. Smith
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 3:36 PM
To: athen at athenpro.org
Subject: [Athen] Help for student with hearing impairment


Hi all -

I have a student whose online course relies heavily on DVDs, and he is
losing a good portion of the lecture due to his hearing impairment. 
I've looked at the DVD and the instructor seems pretty clear, but often
looks at his slides....I suspect that the student may be losing some
lipread material at those points.

Sound enhancement has helped, but not enough.

The student wears hearing aids and is currently using an FM-like system
that plugs directly into his hearing aid.

My question:  are there FM-type systems out there that can accept a
line-in from another source (like a computer)?

Are there any devices that can go from a line out directly to the
hearing aid?

At this point I don't have any make/model information on anything.  We
can always transcribe, but we're well into the semester and the student
is just coming to us....I hate to make him wait to get transcripts.

Thoughts?  Other ideas?

THANKS!

Stacy


Stacy Smith
Adaptive Technology Specialist
Disability Support Services
202 Holton Hall
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS  66506
Phone:  785-532-6441
FAX:  785-532-6457
Email:  stacylee at ksu.edu

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