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Digital technologies have an amazing potential in education and huge efforts and interest are being put into empowering teachers for better learning outcomes. The European Commission is accordingly strongly supporting, through policies and funding, digital learning in the European Education System. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exemplified the necessity of broadly accessible online educational resources.Unfortunately, disabled students are often left apart from this mainstream of research and innovation in Educational Technologies because the platforms and tools are not designed taking this group of users into account. As a result, students with disabilities suffer from a double disadvantage: not only cannot they benefit from the new teaching methodologies, but they cannot even access more traditional textbook-style digital learning material to support their self-studying. The overall goal of this project’s proposal is to significantly contribute to increase the number of online open educational resources accessible for disabled students, with an emphasis on visually impaired. It therefore stands up for a more inclusive e-learning.By developing further the results of the Erasmus Plus KA201 project INDIe, 2018-1-ES01-KA201-050924, http://indieproject.eu, an authoring tool will be delivered which implements a layer of generation of accessible content. It will therefore allow teachers and educators to easily produce rich online learning units which are accessible to students with visual impairment and possibly additional disabilities.Moreover, a number of accessible learning units on a range of topics and educational levels will be produced and published to the INDIeOpen repository of Open Educational Resources. These will be open to use, share, modify by any person interested. An online course on inclusive education for the professional development of teachers, staff or any person interested in the education of students with disabilities, will also be made available on INDIeOpen. Finally, the authoring tool INDIeAuthor itself will be adapted for a seamless experience for authors with visual impairment, who will be empowered to create their own online digital content.To achieve these goals, a consortium was built in a complementary perspective with partners with different profiles: a higher education institution with a strong technological know-how; organisations - a charity and specialised schools - with expertise and decades of experience in the education of students with visual impairment and additional disabilities; mainstream high schools with visually impaired students; a regional authority for education which in charge of attending students with educational needs in the Region of Murcia, and finally, a Greek association of teachers who share the passion to promote STEM subjects in education.The project aims to make a difference to the education of learners with disabilities allowing them to fully participate into digital learning, and helping them overcome some of the difficulties they have in education. This will be primarily achieved within the partnership but also on a regional, national and international level, taking advantage of multiplier events and of the networks our partners belong to. Likewise, we desire to improve awareness and training regarding inclusive education in the mainstream partner schools, and more generally in all schools we have contact with, on a regional, national and international level.All generated units along the project are published in INDIeOpen under a Creative Commons License, which means that any student in the world can use the units for his or her self-study, and any teacher in the world can link it from their Learning Management System as an Open Educational Resource. Our desire is to achieve a level of dissemination which would allow many students and teachers to be aware of these OER, contributing to a global education community.Finally, all the code of the intellectual outputs will be available in GitHub. It is our ambition that, as the community of authors and users grow, more programmers join the community and contribute to the code by sending pull requests and programming new modules and functionalities.Regarding the methodology, because of its strong technological component, the workflow will basically follow the Agile paradigm, so that functionalities are progressively delivered and tested, and the feedback of users and beta-testers are incorporated in the development process. The testing activities will therefore be organised by the partners in a systematic manner, and the users’ feedback be collected to guide further development.
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