Tim Coughlan

The Open University (UK) · Institute of Educational Technology

Creating and utilizing simple links between items and locations in map-based systems has become a mainstream component of modern computing. In this paper, we explore support for ‘art mapping’, an activity that requires consideration of more complex interpretations of spatial relationships as users engage with identifying locations of relevance to a...

Administrative processes that need to be completed to maintain a basic standard of living, to study, or to attain employment, are perceived to create burdens for disabled people. The navigation of information, forms, communications, and assessments to achieve a particular goal raises diverse accessibility issues. In this paper we explore the differ...

Student mental health is a critical issue that institutions are struggling to tackle proactively. The wellbeing of students is largely invisible to institutions unless specific mental health conditions are diagnosed and disclosed. In comparison to the importance placed on academic aspects, the affective experiences of education throughout the study...

Open Educational Resources aim to offer learning to all, yet the language level used in resources could be a barrier to many potential learners. This paper examines the readability of 200 OER courses in English from two major OER course platforms. We compared the means of readability metrics between these OER courses at different educational levels...

Open data has potential value as a material for use in learning activities. However, approaches to harnessing this are not well understood or in mainstream use in education. In this research, early adopters from a diverse range of educational projects and teaching settings were interviewed to explore their rationale for using open data in teaching,...

Many higher education institutions moved from in-person to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, but these shifts have a longer history and potential. They require challenging individual and collective decision making by staff, beyond their usual repertoire of practice. This paper, therefore, aims to understand the nature of decisions that...

Administrative processes are ubiquitous in modern life and have been identified as a particular burden to those with accessibility needs. Students who have accessibility needs often have to understand guidance, fill in complex forms, and communicate with multiple parties to disclose disabilities and access appropriate support. Conversational user i...

Accessibility, inclusive teaching, and student support are multi-faceted; they are dependent on wider institutional factors, such as leadership, resource, systems, and culture. To be truly inclusive requires a whole institution approach, with voices, perspectives, and stakeholder buy-in sought from across the institution. This can be extremely chal...

This is the tenth report in a series of reports exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment. It proposes ten promising innovations for a post-pandemic world of education: hybrid models, dual learning scenarios, pedagogies of microcredentials, pedagogy of autonomy, watch parties, influencer-led education, pedagogies of the home, pedagog...

Reading academic and specialised texts in a foreign language is a difficult process, and support for making materials more linguistically accessible is scarce. Approaches used in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching could inform responses to this, as in EFL academic texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible. However, t...

Open Educational Resources (OERs) aim to provide equal access to education to all. Yet, the language level used in OERs in English was found to require native speaker or advanced English language proficiency. There is a call to make these resources more comprehensible, yet, few previous studies have explored the effects of simplifying OERs for non-...

In this chapter we explore a variety of topics related to emerging technologies in the post-secondary education of students with all types of disabilities. Much has changed in the past decade. This includes: (1) the impact and evolution of the increasing accessibility of general use technologies, comprising built-in accessibility features and acces...

Administrative burden in education is a serious issue for disabled students. Form-filling and bureaucracy are ubiquitous in further and higher education, particularly for students who need to disclose a disability and arrange for accommodations and support for an equitable educational experience. Paradoxically, many of these processes are inherentl...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are widely available and have become a common option for learners. However, their full potential cannot be realised if they are not accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. It is, therefore, important to understand the different stakeholders and their requirements and perspectives in designi...

The Digital Decisions project analysed how staff in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa made decisions to make greater use of online learning. We explored challenges, how key decisions were made, and the impacts of these on students and staff. We also gathered views on good practices in digital decision ma...

The focus of this paper is the design of technology products and services for disabled students in higher education. It analyses the perspectives of disabled students studying in the US, the UK, Germany, Israel and Canada, regarding their experiences of using technologies to support their learning. The students shared how the functionality of the t...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This ninth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a widespread influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the Ins...

In this paper, we describe accessible design considerations for the Assistants for the Disclosure and Management of Information about Needs and Support project (ADMINS). In ADMINS, artificial intelligence (AI) services are being used to create a virtual assistant (VA), which is being designed to enable students to disclose any disabilities, and to...

Higher educational institutions (HEIs) often categorise certain students as 'disabled' in order to support inclusive and equitable study. 'Disabled' students studying in higher education may be asked to 'disclose a disability', request and agree 'reasonable adjustments' that their institution will 'provide' them, and engage with processes such as a...

To support inclusive and equitable study, higher educational institutions (HEIs) often address students categorised as ‘disabled’ in communications to provide information about support or encourage disclosure of information about conditions. However, if students do not identify with the language used it creates barriers to accessing support. There...

There is considerable evidence to suggest that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can make a positive contribution to students’ experiences in higher education. Students with disabilities therefore have a positive outlook and attitude to ICT. Despite all these positive things, the ICT, disability, and higher education community have...

Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers

This paper reports the design of a four-component audit to evaluate the accessibility of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The MOOC accessibility audit was designed as part of a research programme at The Open University (UK) that aimed to assess the current state of accessibility of MOOC platforms and resources, to uncover accessibility barriers...

Open online courses could provide stepping stones for audiences that are under-represented in higher education (HE). However, there are concerns that these instead proliferate forms of exclusion and do not address known difficulties for widening participation. We explore how organisations that represent the perspectives of particular underserved au...

Students have diverse circumstances, experiences, and goals. The challenges they face are often invisible to the educators and staff working to support them. In this paper we describe the design of a novel tool to support each student to represent their own study journey. This has been created with the participation of students and other stakeholde...

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This seventh report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce the report, a group of academics at the I...

It has been argued that Open Educational Resources (OER) present opportunities for innovation in education. However, there has been a lack of retrospective analysis of the forms of innovation that can emerge through OER, and the processes and challenges these entail. This paper presents a post-project analysis of the diverse uses and impacts of ope...

Engaging residential communities with each other and with management remains a challenge. Housing providers deploy a variety of engagement strategies, some of which are supported by digital technologies. Their individual success is varied and integrated, multi-pronged approaches are seen to be more successful. As part of those, it is important to a...

Engaging residential communities with each other and with management remains a challenge. Housing providers deploy a variety of engagement strategies, some of which are supported by digital technologies. Their individual success is varied and integrated, multipronged approaches are seen to be more successful. As part of those, it is important to ad...

An effective open eLearning environment should consider the target learner's abilities, learning goals, where learning takes place, and which specific device(s) the learner uses. MOOC platforms struggle to take these factors into account and typically are not accessible, inhibiting access to environments that are intended to be open to all. A serie...

The outcome from the research being reported in this paper is the design of an accessibility audit to evaluate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for accessibility and to arrive at solutions and adaptations that can meet user needs. This accessibility audit includes expert-based heuristic evaluations and user-based evaluations of the MOOC platform...

The UK television industry has increasingly integrated multiple screen technologies into multiplatform ‘digital estates’. Such ‘digital estates’ also emerge in domestic contexts. The complex, but mundane and ephemeral, nature of these domestic ‘digital estates’ requires new methodologies for understanding how they operate within the daily lives of...

Accessibility cannot be fully achieved through adherence to technical guidelines, and must include processes that take account of the diverse contexts and needs of individuals. A complex yet important aspect of this is to understand and utilise feedback from disabled users of systems and services. Open comment feedback can complement other practice...

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are making low cost learning opportunities available at large scale to diverse groups of learners. For that reason, MOOCs need to be accessible so that they can offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all. In order to direct efforts towards developing accessible MOOCs, it is important to understand the curr...

The outcome from the research being reported in this paper is the design of an accessibility audit to evaluate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for accessibility and to arrive at solutions and adaptations that can meet user needs. This accessibility audit includes expert-based heuristic evaluations and user-based evaluations of the MOOC platform...

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning at...

The UK television industry has increasingly integrated multiple screen technologies into multiplatform ‘digital estates’. Such ‘digital estates’ also emerge in domestic contexts. The complex, but mundane and ephemeral nature of these domestic ‘digital estates’, requires new methodologies for understanding how they operate within the daily lives of...

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) have not developed with an inherent capacity to attend to the needs of disabled students. In our research, we aim to understand the social, contextual and organisational issues behind these inadequacies. Through this, interventions and best practices can be developed to improve...

This paper presents a critical review of several applications of drama-related methods to design, discussing their benefits and limitations and providing comment on practical aspects of their implementation. Drama-related methods can shed light on the contexts in which a new product will be used, helping to clarify any potential issues users may ha...

Accessibility focuses on supporting people with disabilities – such as those related to auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and vision requirements. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are no longer a novelty and the technologies associated with them should cater to all users irrespective of their accessibility requirements. In thi...

Mobile technology plays an increasing role in museum and cultural heritage contexts. In most cases, these tools support the relatively passive consumption of expert interpretations, or the unguided generation of content by users. This paper explores the potential for technologies to help museum visitors, encountering unfamiliar objects, to engage w...

This collection presents the stories of our contributors’ experiences and insights, in order to demonstrate the enormous potential for openly-licensed and accessible datasets (Open Data) to be used as Open Educational Resources (OER). Open Data is an umbrella term describing openly-licensed, interoperable, and reusable datasets which have been crea...

This case study explores why and how open data can be used as a material with which to produce engaging challenges for students as they are introduced to programming. Through describing the process of producing the assignments, and learner responses to them, we suggest that open data is a powerful material for designing learning activities because...

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a novel mechanism to develop research proposals and distribute funding: Creativity Greenhouse (CG). Building on an established funding sandpit mechanism for co-located participants, communication technologies and structures were designed to support similar activities at-a-distance. Given a particula...

This paper presents a systematic review which explores the nature of assistive technologies currently being designed, developed and evaluated for dementia sufferers and their carers. A search through four large databases, followed by filtering by relevance, led to the identification and subsequent review of papers. Our review revealed that the majo...

Slides supplement for: Evans et al - A Systematic Review of Dementia focused Assistive Technology - HCII 2015. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280490271_A_Systematic_Review_of_Dementia_Focused_Assistive_Technology http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-20916-6_38

The Creativity Bento Box is a physical resource pack, designed to support casual social interaction and break taking in an intensive, computer-mediated social activity. It was developed within the Creativity Greenhouse project, which piloted a mechanism to create research proposals and distribute funding at a distance. This involved facilitated pha...

This article presents ArtMaps, a crowdsourcing web-based app for desktop and mobile use that allows users to locate, move and annotate artworks in the Tate collection in relation to one or more sets of locations. Here the authors show that ArtMaps extends the 'space' of the museum and facilitates a new, pluriperspectival, way of looking at art. Leo...

The last fifty years have seen an exponential increase in the amount of technology embedded in and passing though home environments, creating spaces that are now technologically as well as socially, psychologically and environmentally complex. It is only in the last fifteen years that the study of Human-Computer Interaction in the home has entered...

Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging a crowd to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable...

Participation in forms of drama and narrative can provoke empathy and creativity in user-centred design processes. In this paper, we expand upon existing methods to explore the potential for responsive scripted experiences that are delivered through the combination of sensors and output devices placed in a home. The approach is being developed in t...

HomeSys 2014 will provide an insightful and constructive setting for the growing community of researchers studying ubiquitous technology in domestic spaces. Homes have been a consistent setting for ubiquitous computing research and development. This continues to evolve, reflecting the spread of computing into ever more of the fabric of our everyday...

This paper examines and contrasts two approaches to collecting behavioural data within the home. The first of these involves filming from static video cameras combined with network logging to capture media consumption activities across multiple screens. The second utilises wearable cameras that passively collect still images to provide insights int...

This paper discusses the practical implications of applying cultural probes to drive the design of assistive technologies. Specifically we describe a study in which a probe was deployed with home-based carers of people with dementia in order to capture critical data and gain insights of integrating the technologies into this sensitive and socially...

This paper discusses the practical implications of applying cultural probes to drive the design of assistive technologies. Specifically we describe a study in which a probe was deployed with home-based carers of people with dementia in order to capture critical data and gain insights of integrating the technologies into this sensitive and socially...

The introduction of new ubiquitous computing technologies has the capacity to greatly affect the home, a space that is core to human experience, yet remains understudied owing to its sensitive, semi-private nature. Scenario-based methods have previously been used to collect home technology design responses but they have tended to over-simplify the...

In recent years, social computing technologies have emerged to support innovative new relationships between organisations and the public. Inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised kno...

Homes are essential contexts in which to understand how technologies are used and experienced. At the same time they hold substantial challenges for conducting research, exploring novel designs, and building understanding. In this paper we review approaches to studying the home, including recent innovations and issues that should guide further meth...

We present an approach – evocative computing – that demonstrates how ‘at hand’ technologies can be ‘picked up’ and used by people to create meaningful and lasting experiences, through connecting and interacting with the past. The approach is instantiated here through a suite of interactive technologies configured for an indoor-outdoor setting that...

We present an approach – evocative computing – that demonstrates how ‘at hand’ technologies can be ‘picked up’ and used by people to create meaningful and lasting experiences, through connecting and interacting with the past. The approach is instantiated here through a suite of interactive technologies configured for an indoor-outdoor setting that...