ALPE
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Some questions you may have about the project
Here you can find answers to some questions regarding the ALPE project. If you have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Four organisations from 3 countries (Spain, United Kingdom and Greece) will be involved in the project:
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The Open University of the United Kingdom
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ALPE – with a consortium of 4 partners from Spain, the UK and Greece - is a validation project involving an accessible, standard based e-learning solution for visually impaired, hearing impaired and adult learners that lack basic skills. The ALPE service also targets potential customers of the proposed service both on the supply and demand side of the e-Learning value chain.
The objective of ALPE is to provide services to customers to enable accessible educational resources to be enhanced, created or developed in collaboration with an international network of expert partners, thus improving the quality of educational materials available to all groups of learners.
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Students with disabilities are more likely to be disadvantaged and socially excluded therefore need to feel motivated to want to improve their skills. ICT and online learning are an excellent way to attract these groups of learners because of the flexibility of accessing learning anytime and any place. The self-esteem that comes from learning using ICT as a medium of delivery and the privacy of learning to improve one’s basic skills are disguised under the pretext of learning ICT. This is also true for adults who lack basic skills.
The focus of ALPE service is visual and hearing impaired, and adult learners, but others may also benefit from the service.
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The pilot project involves the validation of basic skill courses with 300 students in Spain, the UK and Greece as well as the validation with more than 50 stakeholders in order to assess the solution’s advantages to reduce possible technological barriers and to study the possibilities for large scale deployment.
Within the project, ALPE service will be validated with:
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Visually impaired students
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Hearing impaired students
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Adult learners
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Key stakeholders belong to the following groups:
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On the supply side: technology providers, service providers, content providers
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On the demand side: public market, educational institutions, corporations, end-user organisations.
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The term Basic Skills used within the ALPE project is defined as follows: "the ability to read, write and speak in the respective language and to use mathematics at a level necessary to function at work and in society in general". This concurs with the Lisbon Memorandum of Understanding (23-24 March 2000) and the Uppsala Swedish Presidency (2002) which reinforced the requirement for training in basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic; lifelong learning; IT proficiency and their fundamental knowledge needed for everyday life'.
For example in the United Kingdom, there are 7 million adults who cannot read or write at Level One, which is the equivalent of the ability of a 14 year old in school. So they would still need to polish up on their grammar, sentence structure, have the skills to read academic books, be able to write letters of employment properly. In Europe, one in every four Europeans has basic skills problems too and this is a serious problem that affects the employability of a person. Within the ALPE project, we will be delivering basic skill courses through an accessible environment.
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