Adaptación de entornos virtuales de aprendizaje a las preferencias y necesidades personales del estudiante

Resumen

Citizens are not guaranteed equal access to education despite the evolution of services and information technology. People with different capabilities have not been given rights to virtual education, and there is a digital divide between individuals with functional capabilities and those with limitations such as hearing or seeing problems. The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to research on the development of accessibility in the field of virtual education. The procedure followed was the application of ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0 standards to the development of a model for adapting virtual learning environments that establishes basic guidelines for effectively converting learning management systems into environments accessible to people with different capabilities and its validation through the creation of a prototype. The work was carried out in five phases (data collection, outlining the basic guidelines of the model, application of guidelines to a prototype educational platform, evaluation of its effectiveness and estimation of its usefulness and ease of use), necessary to guarantee an effective model that provides user-friendly virtual educational environments. These phases have resulted in three articles that have been published in high impact journals. The first article specifies the fundamental guidelines of the model extracted from international standards (ISO/IEC 24751 and IMS AFA 3.0), which guide the process and describes the necessary guiding principles designed to ensure the effectiveness and quality required by any system and by the standards studied. The article also shows the application of this model to a prototype learning platform detailing the properties that give it characteristics such as robustness, portability, scalability, efficiency and reusability. The second article aims to test the effectiveness of the developed tool by evaluating the learning performance of groups of students with different capabilities when using the application. The evaluation was performed by comparing a pre-test before the adaptation and a post-test after it. The third article investigates the ease of use of the system and the students’ attitude towards its usefulness to verify its usability and detect points that can be improved in future work.