Supporting deaf learners in online learning
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A lightning talk presentation from Jisc's Focus on the future: new developments in accessible and assistive technologies event held on 16 March 2022 as part of Digifest community fringe.
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Supporting deaf learners in online learning
- 1. Supporting deaf learners in online learning
- 2. Aims of the session • To generate thoughts and reflect on practice • Highlight lived experiences • General hints and tips • Short session – to initiate discussion • Introduce National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) Note: We use the term ‘deaf’ to refer to all types of hearing loss.
- 3. Pre Enrolment – Participation Examination Pre- enrolment Participation Examination Online learning journey
- 4. Pre-enrolment • Ask during enrolment - do they have any communication needs or require adjustments to allow them to participate in the session? • Additional amendments - large print, electronic copies, documents, communication support, etc. • Provide a named contact to discuss options.
- 5. Participation Individual hearing and communication requirements are on a spectrum and varies on settings and activities: • One to one • Small groups • Large groups • Online demonstrations Develop a working relationship and understanding of communication requirements and methods. Note: British Sign Language (BSL) is a translation from one language to another (equivalent to English to French)
- 7. Areas to consider during session Deaf participant with BSL interpreter • Requires qualified BSL interpreter (use NRCPD website to check) • 40 minutes maximum, or you will need to book 2 interpreters • Ensure interpreter is visible at all times and allow multi-pinning, if required • Speak to the participant and not the interpreter • The participant will be overloaded if they are required to follow chat boxes, visual presentations/demonstrations, and the live content via BSL interpreter. Deaf with partial hearing, uses lip-reading • Ensure participants can spotlight or pin the speaker or limit video feeds to 1 - 4 people to ensure they can be lip-read • Allow participants to turn on captions • Clarification of tasks/activities in the chat box can be helpful • If holding a chat discussion, allow time for participant to read the responses, take a break in presenting • Face the camera while speaking and make sure your face can be seen clearly – don’t sit with your back to a window.
- 8. Hints and tips • Limit the number of sessions in a day – energy levels to focus and absorb information is significant compared to hearing participants. Factor in regular micro breaks to catch up or have an eye-break • Allow participants to freely enable or disable captions. Some platforms are unable to use captions, but services are available to have captions on an external webpage • Allow participates freely to spotlight or pin speakers and interpreters • Look for positive feedback – ‘Thumbs up if you can follow and understand me?’ • Agree on a method for deaf participants to feedback when communication fails or information requires clarification or repeating • Follow good presenting practice - pace, content, time for participants reflect, etc. • Allow time for BSL interpreters to swap over, checking to make sure pace is suitable • Stop screen-sharing if no longer using or referring to the presentation to enable a clearer and larger view of participants.
- 9. Activities and Examinations • Make sure instructions are clear and understood • Ensure communication is available through multiple channels and not just audibly • Allow extra time for BSL interpreters to explain tasks and questions, particularly during quick-fire discussions • Give time to process tasks and questions – an advance copy would be helpful • Breakout rooms – allow time for the re-establishment of interpreter and make sure they are in the correct room!
- 10. Discussion What are your… • experiences • challenges/barriers • solutions? How can NDCS support… • research • guidance • learning opportunities? Please raise your hand virtually or physically to comment
- 11. Want to contact the team? technology@ndcs.org.uk
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon, thank you for inviting us to join this event and welcome to this session on Supporting deaf learners in online learning. I am Gavin Songer and I am the Assistive Technology Officer here at the National Deaf Children’s Society. I am deaf myself - I have been profoundly deaf since birth. I wore hearing aids up to the age of 11 and I’ve been using a cochlear implant for 20 years to help me to hear. You will notice that we have Linda here today. Linda is an interpreter and will be interpreting my presentation in British Sign Language.
- The aims of this short session is to reflect on practises about how to support deaf or hard of hearing participants during online learning. I will share some of my experiences to highlight the advice and information. I will then suggest some general hints and tips followed by a short discussion on the current challenges you face and the practises that you follow. This is a valuable opportunity for the National Deaf Children’s Society to introduce ourselves to the sector. The NDCS give expert support on childhood deafness, raise awareness and campaign for deaf children’s rights, so that they have the same opportunities as everyone else. Our vision is a world without barriers for every deaf child. I appreciate this session will be fairly short, but the advice and guidance we collect today will help to give us a picture of what support is required to support deaf learners.
- The session is broken down into three main aspects of an online journey for deaf person, although we appreciate it varies and changes depending on the course. Typically, the three stages are pre-enrolment, participation, and some examination or assessment may be included. Each stage needs consideration to ensure the course is inclusive and the deaf participant are able to succeed and actively engage through online courses.
- During enrolment, it is important to find an opportunity for individuals with different communication and learning needs to report their requirements. A hearing loss may not be the deaf student’s only disability and they may have personal preferences. Provide a named contact - typically within universities and colleges, it is common for the disability services or student support department to provide this information. Bear in mind that universities and other educational establishments offer a wide range of course formats – lectures, presentations, webinars, informal learning situations, etc. If this is the case, recommendations and adjustments are not always automatically passed on or highlighted to those leading individual sessions, so it is important that the deaf students’ requirements are known and actioned by all involved in the delivery of the course.
- It is important to understand that different settings and activities require different strategies for communication support. Although this may sound complex and difficult, but by simply asking the person who requires communication adjustments what their preferences and experiences are will help you be more inclusive. I will soon provide you with general strategies of how to be more inclusive in order to reduce the need for planning and individual adjustments. You may find in one to one settings with somebody who is competent in lip reading and are provided with advance access to materials and tasks in black and white, little or no additional support is required. When this moves onto smaller groups it may be important to ensure that participants are aware of simple conversation rules, such as one person speaking at a time. Also, through what channel? By channel, I mean the medium of communication - voice conversations or typing in the chat box. Try not to mix two together or allow time for both channels to be followed in a linear fashion rather than trying to read text and visually lipread at the same time. Equally, this is the same for a BSL interpreter. One example of how to support this as a host or presenter is if people put comments in the chat box, you can respond from time to time by reading out the posts in the chat box to enable the person who is a lip-reader to understand and observe this information but equally, this allows BSL interpreters to translate this information to the deaf student. Larger groups typically will require reduced number of cameras turned on, to allow the deaf participant to see BSL interpreters and lip-read speakers more clearly. Again, use the same techniques of a working in small groups where chat or parallel conversations are occurring, it is important for the presenter to relay and share this information to the main group periodically. Providing online demonstrations can be more challenging for deaf and hard of hearing members to follow, by lip-reading or watching the BSL interpreter at the same time as watching any demonstrations such as a mouse clicking on different buttons within an application or directing instructions. It would be better practice to verbalise your intentions and actions by providing a demonstration with minimal audio description. Speak, demonstrate, then speak again. At this point, it is helpful to check in with others to make sure they're able to keep up with your demonstration. This is really not much different to following standard best practise when presenting typical online demonstrations, by ensuring people are able to keep up with the set pace. Additionally, if possible, access to the written materials or screenshots beforehand may help deaf students, but this is true for all participants. On a final note, you may or may not be aware, but British Sign Language is not a one-to-one replacement to English, it is its own language and interpretations are equivalent to translating English to French, for example. Just like all languages, British Sign Language evolves and has regional differences and its vocabulary expands to deal with new words and concepts. If there is not sign for an English word, then this will have to be spelt out which requires extra time for the translation. If a new word is used repeatedly, usually a sign will be made to save time from fingerspelling it. For example, it’s much quicker to sign ‘coronavirus’ instead of spelling it!
- I‘m just going to touch on some examples of my own experiences. I went to university over ten years ago, so the majority of my support was provided face-to-face in the form of electronic or manual notetakers and BSL interpreters. Like many of you, since the pandemic most of my meetings and learning opportunities have moved online and remotely, either via MS Teams or Zoom. My preferred platform is Microsoft Teams, simply because the auto-captioning feature is much easier and efficient to use. In Zoom, auto-captioning needs to be enabled by the host, whereas in Teams I can just turn them on myself. However, if I use interpreters online, I prefer to use Zoom, as it has multi-pinning options and I am able to move the interpreter around the screen with ease. I can’t seem to do this in Teams, as individual participants seem to be fixed into place, but please correct me if I’m wrong. I have recently attended an online meeting where I was met with silence and the participants were communicating to me via the chat box. It wasn’t until about ten minutes into the meeting that the participants realised that I was able to hear them. They had made the assumption that because I am deaf, I am unable to hear anything at all! Don’t be afraid to ask deaf students about their preferred communication methods and access requirements. You don’t need to know their medical history, just enough information to get an insight into what they can access with and without additional support. I’m proud to be deaf and I don’t hide it. I feel it is important to highlight my hearing loss to ensure I get the access and support I need. However, be aware that not all deaf students have a deaf identity. On that basis, try not to single them out during online sessions. Just ask openly if everyone can follow and can understand. Don’t put the deaf student on the spot by addressing them directly, unless a question or instruction is specifically for them. I’ve been to a couple of online sessions where presenters will say ‘Are you following, Gavin?’ or ‘Am I talking too fast, Gavin?’. Just address all participants and they will inform you directly if you need to amend your delivery.
- These are just examples of the kind of things to consider for individual deaf students of varying degree of hearing loss and communication preferences. These considerations are not exhaustive and will very much depend on individual needs. Discuss access requirements directly with the student – don’t assume that they do or don’t need certain requirements. [ELABORATE ON THE POINTS ON THE SLIDE]
- Here is some general guidance for running online sessions with deaf students. [ELABORATE ON THE POINTS ON THE SLIDE]
- [ELABORATE ON THE POINTS ON THE SLIDE]
- For the remainder of the session, I’ll open the floor to discussion. Feel free to ask any questions too, if you have any. I’ll be interested to hear about the experiences and challenges you have had with deaf participants. It’ll also be useful to know how the NDCS can help to support this sector going forward.
- Thank you for watching today’s webinar – I hope you have found it useful. Please feel free to ask any questions you have for the remainder of this session. If I cannot answer it immediately, I will be sure to look into it and respond to you after the webinar. If you think of a question later on that you wish you’d asked, feel free to contact us directly by email.