E-Learning Galore! Providing Quality Educational Experiences Across a Universe of Individuals with Special Needs through Distributed Content Adaptation

The vision of e-learning is evolving at an impressive pace. Providing quality and copious e-learning experiences may play a vital role for disadvantaged people who face special problems or needs, such as physical disabilities, for example. The creation and provision of accessible e-learning contents may hence become a key factor enabling individuals with different access needs to be re-engaged back into the society, through education. To magnify the benefits for humans with diverse capabilities, as well as to enhance social inclusion, mobile and distributed e-technologies are further emerging as an effective means suitable to adapt to human users with varying characteristics, under heterogeneous context conditions. With all this in view, in this paper, we present the key issues of a distributed e-learning system developed to deliver accessible, customized and multimedia learning experiences to learners with different skills. The main innovation of our work amounts to the fact that, to decrease the risk of excluding individuals with particular access capabilities, our system manipulates Learning Objects (LOs) which are dynamically adapted, based on the specific needs of nontypical learners and on the barriers that they can encounter in the environment. Alongside an operational description of the content adaptation process we have devised, we report insightful results from a real-world case study.