by Rosemarie Punzalan, CFILC’s Training Specialist
The CSUN’s 27th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference was held in San Diego from February 27 – March 3, 2012. I had the opportunity to attend Thursday sessions as well as network with professionals, especially the vendors. The session that interested me the most was: Creating Accessible Online Learning Content: Learn how to create Accessible Online Learning Content using the Moodle LMS to Deliver your Courses Online.
Moodle LMS (Learning Management System) is a course management system designed for educators who want to create quality online courses. It is a free and open source software that is used by universities, schools, companies and independent teachers. Moodle is not 100% accessible. Some built-in Moodle features are barriers like the multimedia filters and the “File Picker” widget.
Luckily, there is a solution. Carroll Center for the Blind has created an online course that instructs curriculum developers on how to create accessible course materials using Moodle. Their solutions include:
- Configure Moodle to create the most accessible framework for delivering courses.
- Provide effective and easy-to-use tools and filters to make it easy for content creators to embed rich media into their curriculum.
- Instruct course creators in the use of Markdown, a lightweight markup language, designed to reduce the learning curve required to publish semantic, standards compliant HTML instead of a WYSIWYG.
- Create a system of best practices and clearly define and illustrate them to content creators.
- Introduce accessibility and usability concepts by interweaving them with concepts already familiar to content creators.
In the past I created a quick AT Network Moodle as a test for the Training Program and did not complete it because there were some accessibility challenges. With the above solutions I am thinking of spending some time creating an AT Network Training Program that consists of Self-Paced Trainings and Archived Trainings.
Have you heard of Moodle LMS? If so, have you used it and what for? Let us know in the comment box below.
Resources:
Presentation in Markdown (text) format (good for screen reader access) – http://media.carrolltech.org/csun2012/presentation.txt
Presentation in HTML (best for screen reader access) – http://media.carrolltech.org/csun2012/presentation.html
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Nice post! that is good information about management courtesy of Moodle, it is useful to me thanks.