Designing E-Courses for Hearing Impaired Students: Practices and Challenges

Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of designing educational e-courses for teaching deaf and hard-of-hearing students taking into consideration their special educational needs. The paper presents the practices of online learning for such students at Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University. The paper is aimed at publishing the results of research related to designing electronic courses for deaf and hearing impaired students, including adaptation of the videos, the use of an e-dictionary of terms, graphic and text materials illustrated by e-courses on Descriptive geometry and English language taught at Kalashnikov ISTU. The study was conducted at the Centre for inclusive education at Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University, the experiments involved 11-19 hearing-impaired students majoring in Mechanical Engineering. The students were asked to participate in a series of experiments involving the use of video materials, different graphic forms of information presentation and an electronic terms dictionary. The participants were asked to answer test questions about presented material, fill in questionnaires and discuss the experiment. As a result of our study, the following typical structure of an e-course units was proposed: each unit starts with the introduction of an e-vocabulary of terms (in Russian sign language), followed by a test for comprehension of the presented terms, then presents the theoretical material in the form of video lectures with subtitles, lecture notes, activity book, step-by-step instructions to perform tasks and additional materials.