[Athen] FW: International Research on Supporting Students in Lifelong Learning

[Berkowitz, Daniel J]

Dear ATHEN members,

The following is from a researcher at the University of York in the UK.
I am passing this along at their request.

 
=========================
Daniel Berkowitz - Assistant Director
Boston University Office of Disability Services
19 Deerfield Street, 2nd floor
Boston, MA 02215
 
(617) 353-3658 (office)
(617) 353-9646 (fax)
djbrky at bu.edu (eMail)
www.bu.edu/disability
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Omar Kheir [mailto:kheir at cs.york.ac.uk] 
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 11:50 AM
To: Berkowitz, Daniel J
Subject: International Research on Supporting Students in Lifelong
Learning

Dear Daniel Berkowitz

I am a researcher at the University of York, currently involved in an 
international project (EU4All, see www.eu4all-project.eu) which is 
investigating how to use the potential of virtual learning environments 
to better support students with disabilities and mature students 
(although we are well aware that these systems currently have big 
accessibility problems at the moment). We are collecting information 
about the services available for disabled and mature students world wide

in education, and we would like to ensure broad representation of USA 
institutions. This is to ensure that our results are relevant to 
institutions internationally, and in particular to the USA academic 
community.

We have a survey for everyone working in higher education institutions 
(lecturers, disability officers, technicians, library and admin staff, I

do mean everyone). Also, we don't want only people with experience of 
working with students with disabilities or mature students, we are 
interested in everyone's experiences. It is quite a long survey, it will

take up to 40 minutes to complete (the clever software does at least 
allow you to do some and come back later if you wish). Because it is 
quite an effort, we are going to hold a prize draw with 10 x $20 US 
Amazon gift vouchers amongst all respondents.

I would be very grateful if you could complete the survey. If you could 
also publicise it to your colleagues at your institution, that would be 
wonderful. If it's useful, I can provide a small poster (as a pdf file).

Of course, we also want to get information from students, and we have a 
survey for students, both disabled and non-disabled, mature and new 
students. Again it's quite long, but there is also a prize draw of 10 x 
$20 US Amazon gift vouchers. If you can publicise the survey to 
students, I'd be very grateful.

Both surveys can be accessed from the following web page:
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/hci/eu4all/survey/index.htm

The surveys have been extensively tested for accessibility, so they 
should work well with screen readers and magnification programs.

Many thanks for your help with this. If you have any questions about our

project, do not hesitate to contact me.

Yours,

Omar Kheir
Research Associate
Department of Computer Science
The University of York
Heslington
York, UK
YO10 5DD
Email: kheir at cs.york.ac.uk