Abstract:

What if we could without any additional cost

1. Attend lectures from home?

2. Follow them directly on our screen?

3. Make them accessible from anywhere with assistive technologies

4. Remotely interact with faculty and lecture content in real time?

5. Reduce and eventually eliminate the adverse effects of disabilities?

6. Make disabilities increasingly imperceptible?

Does this sound like an unreachable dream? If so, think again! What prevents disabled students from accessing educational content?

Learning Outcome: (a brief statement of the knowledge participants will gain)

The main objectives of this workshop are that its participants will:

1) Become excited to promote remote teaching using TeamViewer 5 and Skype

2) Become ambassadors to revolutionize teaching and create an all inclusive learning environment independent of space and time in which disabilities play a constantly declining role.

3) Feel comfortable in serving as multiplier for this revolutionizing teaching approach

4) Encourage other faculty and stuff to implement these teaching methods for disabled and non handicapped students alike.

5) Feel comfortable in installing and using TeamViewer 5 and Skype in a variety of settings and give installation instructions to others

6) Evolve from good and diligent administrators to creative and enthusiastic innovators constantly seeking new opportunities to implement our constantly accelerating technical advances to enhance education, research, communication and knowledge transfer rate for everyone.

7) Require instructors and research advisers to offer remote consultations in addition to their face-to-face office hours since this allows visually impaired students to better follow and participate because they can use their assistive technology on their large external monitors

8) Lose their unexpectedly prevalent but unfounded fear of breaching any kind of confidentiality requirements because

a. Even if TeamViewer 5 is running, computers can only be accessed by third parties, if the constantly dynamically changing password for TeamViewer 5 is shared

b. Only computers without confidential data will be used in everyday teaching practice anyways.

Technical required equipments for conducting this workshop:

1. Internet access for all participants

2. At least 2 laptops with permission to install software

3. One overhead projector that can be connected to the laptop

Prior to attending this hands–on accessibility workshop all its participants are expected to:

1. Bring their laptops

2. Install the following free programs and setup user accounts for:

a. TeamViewer 5 (NOT TeamViewer 9) from http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/dyngate.aspx#version5

b. Skype from http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-computer/,

c. A free 60 day trial version of Zoomtext, a widely used screen reader and magnification software, available for no charge at http://www.aisquared.com/products to better experience firsthand the challenges faced by visually impaired students when accessing electronic information.

d. Krut Computer recorder available at no charge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/krut/

3. Play around with Zoomtext using high, e.g. 6 times magnification, to e.g. write and save word documents, calculating with Excel, searching for files, checking emails, using Google calendar, accessing bank accounts and everything else they normally do on their laptops.

Content demonstrated in this workshop:

1. Different visual perspectives of disabled students and instructors will be demonstrated highlighting the advantages of making lectures accessible and available remotely in real time and to integrate distant students in active class discussions.

2. Methods allowing students to directly point at specific parts of the presented instructional material to ask questions or make sure that they can follow, repeat and understand the given instructions, procedures, workflows, etc.

3. Using Krut Computer Recorder (http://sourceforge.net/projects/krut/) to make lectures available online for later references and close captioning for the hearing impaired on YouTube with minimal efforts without depending on traditional camcorders because this method provides an even image higher resolution. A free software package is currently tested for this purpose and can be made available within the next month. An example of an instructional lecture recorded with this software can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ME7gayYeUQ.

4. Compressing and converting recorded lectures to make them better accessible online

Due to its revolutionizing implications this workshop should be open ended and continue until all questions are answered and all ideas are exchanged.

Funding acknowledgement:

This project was supported by the Arkansas INBRE program, with grants from the National Center for Research Resources - NCRR (P20RR016460) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

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Objectives

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Program Description:

What if we could without additional expenses:

1. Attend lectures from home?

2. Follow lectures directly on our screen?

3. Make them accessible from anywhere with assistive technologies?

4. Remotely interact with faculty and lecture content in real time?

5. Reduce and eventually eliminate the adverse effects of disabilities?

6. Make disabilities increasingly imperceptible?

Lecture materials can be made much more accessible to sensory and mobility impaired students simply by installing TeamViewer 5 and Skype on the instructor’s computer. TeamViewer 5 can be freely downloaded for non commercial use at http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/dyngate.aspx#version5 .

When using TeamViewer 5, visually impaired students are no longer challenged by the need to follow the presentations on the overhead projector using highly magnifying heavy telescopic glasses with very small remaining visual field because the lecture can be beamed on their large monitor directly in front of the students’ eyes in real time. Mobility impaired students no longer need to attend classes in person. Subtitles can be added for the hearing impaired after the recorded lecture is stored online using the free software named Krut Computer Recorder (http://sourceforge.net/projects/krut/)l No more physical appearance to office hours is necessary. Visually impaired students can interact with their instructors via their large screen and with their assistive technology. Natural speech recognition software is advancing rapidly thus soon allowing close captioning subtitles for the hearing impaired in real time. This method is also very suitable for one on one tutoring or working in small study groups.

Personal Experiences:

Without this remote teaching method my legal blindness would have prevented me from succeeding in my bioinformatics PhD program since I rapidly need to learn using new interfaces all the time but my visual impairment is preventing me from following general instructions given in the literature because they are written for a normal sighted audience. Since I am legally blind my learning efficiency has been severely limited by the extremely small remaining visual field causing me to easily get lost while navigating through unfamiliar user interfaces with high Zoomtext magnification (see http://www.aisquared.com/products). That is why I need somebody, who can walk me step by step through each unfamiliar and visually overwhelming user interface. Using TeamViewer 5 in combination with Zoomtext allows me to follow my tutor’s mouse with high magnification and they can verify that I am following the correct steps, procedures and workflows without being limited by my small visual field. My tutors can be anywhere in the world.

Common benefits remove separation between disabled and non handicapped students:

Using TeamViewer 5 for lecturing has many advantages even for non handicapped students because – like their disabled peers – they can point to and highlight portions of the content and instructions to which they still have questions. Reversely, the instructor can look at the student’s steps to make sure that they follow the instructions correctly. Students can also demonstrate their work to the entire classroom without even having to leave their seats. This approach is becoming increasingly feasible because – at least most of my classrooms – have been equipped with computer screens right in front of each student’s seat. TeamViewer 5 could easily be installed on the server for the thin clients to which each student has access during lecture. Since instructing with TeamViewer 5 and Skype has advantages for handicapped and non handicapped students alike, disabled students are no longer singled out by needing special accommodations setting them apart from their non disabled peers because they can work with the same setup as everyone else. Furthermore, using TeamViewer 5 and Skype has several advantages over blackboard for everyone because it allows editing uploaded documents by anyone simultaneously.

Remote and flexible office hours are now also possible thus better accommodating the busy and often unexpectedly changing schedule of faculty, staff and students. Professors could even teach courses from home now.

Evaluating Educational Efficiency and Knowledge Transfer Rate:

This approach opens the door for many promising interesting comparative studies evaluating the effectiveness of remotely and in person taught classes and any combination of those components.

Employment and Collaboration

Moreover, the collaboration of experts from different highly specialized disciplines is now feasible since most information is communicated via computer screen anyways. Hence, experts – regardless of their disability-induced limitations – could participate equally in online meetings everywhere, making it easier for disabled job seekers to better integrate into our increasingly competitive workforce, save transportation costs and break down informational silos and barriers, which are often still isolating experts from different disciplines.

Conclusion:

Using these programs could make traditional classrooms obsolete because physical attendance is no longer necessary. We will become increasingly independent from space, location and time constraints. However, direct personal interactions may still remain advantageous because they may allow for forming stronger emotional interpersonal relationships and trust than it might be possible when exclusively depending on remote communication interfaces.

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Topical Outline of Content:

We should move away from the concept of disability, i.e. we should no longer focus on what is wrong; but instead we should move towards a new concept of supportability, i.e. figure out what is needed regardless of the cause. This is a much more drastic paradigm shift than moving from viewing disability as deficiency towards viewing it as diversity. In a way, everyone is disabled in some area and hence would benefit from additional support.

New perspectives on disabilities and their implications: Dissolving the definition of disability

There is no such thing as free choice because once attitude, determination and work ethics depends on once neurotransmitter concentration. I have been very fortunate to be permitted to operate in a relatively non standardized microenvironment where I could concentrate and focus on my strengths without having to overly worry that my weaknesses will be used against me especially those I cannot do anything about.

Given that genomes, phenotypes and hence, individual job-, cognitive- and physiological performances are not standardized, how can we enforce the same social, academic and professional norms on everyone other than Wild Type (WT), for which our standards were developed, without inadvertently discriminating?

The spectrum of disability is gradual, not abrupt. Therefore, everyone is at least minimally disabled in some regards. We only define the performance capabilities of the majority as non disabled or “normal”. Unfortunately, as people age, their physiological, mental, cognitive and metabolic capabilities decline; thus, implying that their level of disability increases. Nevertheless, even though the performance of an 80 year old would be considered disabled (below norm) for a 20 year old, we don’t classify this as disabled. But would it not be better to create a maximally supportive environment for everyone regardless of his/her disabilities?

I would like everyone to participate in the TeamViewer workshop because most of the attendees are skills and techniques multipliers meaning that once they have seen the benefits and potentials they can share it with so many other people. I just wanted to share my more logical approach to view disabilities in a broader context because I feel very alone with this opinion. But if everyone is considered to have some disability and need some accommodations then needing more because of having a more severe disability results less in being singled out.

Since standardization is inevitably going to be unfair for some people why don’t we move away from comparable standardization (i.e. defining a minimum threshold for acceptable performance below which one gets excluded (social Darwinism) to maximizing individual performance, i.e. everybody is maximizing his/her performance to his/her maximum ability? As long as people try, they should be allowed to continue!

If one has 7 children to take care of, isn’t that the same kind of disability as if one needs to take longer for reading due to visual impairment because both conditions reduce the amount of work one can perform within a specified time span but for different reasons. The visually impaired might take twice as long to finish his/her reading assignment but the mom with 7 kids might only have half of the time available for reading. Regardless, the net effect of both situations is that the performance is cut into one half.

A plain level field for overcompensation does not exist because WE CANNOT COMPARE!!!!

Disabled students should run parts of the disability office It should not only be a service for students but also by students. Students should be treated as subjects not as disabled objects

Staff should look on coping skills of its clients and improve from there.

Hands on workshop experiences giving a lecture in reverse where visually impaired professor connects with his/her computer into the presentation computer; thus, he/she can see magnified whereas all other students see normal and are not limited by the small Zoomtext visual field.

Empower students to remove reasons that cause depression rather than trying to change their perspective about those unacceptable situations. Professors should be encouraged to work with their visually impaired students with TeamViewer and Skype rather than having them come to their office.

Since adoption rate of these new remote teaching options is very slow I hope to be able to accelerate them by presenting them at this conference. Disabled students should talk to each other how to apply for funding for assistive technology and their experiences with rehab. They should not fight alone

It is very important for disabled people to know on whom they can count.

Depression can be caused by disability. Therefore, removing disability related barriers and provide good understanding and support is alleviating depression.

Disability staff should be, encouraging, incorporating, disseminating, fostering and enhancing coping strategies of disabled students.

Universities are Social-Darwinistic institutions because they are designed such that not everyone can be successful because they are selective. In contrast to high school, it seems to be an inherent property of post secondary educational institutions that many of its students won’t be able to graduate. However, if one lacks the genetic prerequisites for success, how can one survive in an environment that is already challenging for the Wild Type (WT) population to keep meeting the minimally required expected standards for functioning within a narrow window of expectations? Therefore, a disability office can be viewed as an entity to roll back the Social-Darwinistic consequences which are more likely to occur to people with any kind of deficiencies. Even though many feel uncomfortable to admit the inevitable Social-Darwinist effects, they are clearly evident by the fact that disabled people are far underrepresented minorities in all social aspects of life, such as education, employment, recreation, friendship support network, income, etc. As a disabled person one faces the problem that one needs more money to compensate for the disabilities but has a lower chance for getting hired for well paying and rewarding jobs.

Generally disabled students are very creative in finding ways to become successful despite their disability induced limitations. Students with such attitude have the chance to benefit from post secondary education. Each student is the best expert about his/her challenges and how to best overcome them. Generally, disabled students like me, would like to share our coping mechanisms to make them available to other disabled students so that they can better overcome similar challenges. However, often disabled students do not even know of one another since all data in the disability office is confidential. Therefore, the disability office should function as a skill and technique disseminator making successful tricks to work around disabilities available among all students.

I am myself legally blind and autistic. To overcome the barriers that these disabilities pose in a demanding bioinformatics PhD program, I have been given funds for tutors. Since I can only see a very small portion with my screen because I need very high magnification with Zoomtext, I need tutors, who show me where buttons, icons, menus, checkboxes, etc. are located so that I can use this particular software or web application independently myself.

For this purpose we used Team Viewer 5 and Skype. Team Viewer 5 has the advantage that the tutor, who can be anywhere in the world where there is internet access, can train the disabled student while the disabled student is able to follow his tutors mouse with Zoomtext. Then once shown the disabled students can show his tutor how to perform a certain task and once completed the student can learn independently. This is so much better than depending on the demonstration of the professor on the overhead projector, where many students with low vision cannot follow the mouse or the small red laser pointer.

I am hoping and anticipating that my publications on this topic could contribute to fundamentally change the way we communicate, interact and learn could turn out to be the most valuable and beneficial consequence I could accomplish in graduate school. If we are serious about succeeding in using it as I am currently envisioning we can change the meaning of teaching from its traditionally generalized to a much more individualized approach. This would also allow us to better respond to the needs of students with learning disabilities. If we could convince professors to use this kind of teaching methods on a much larger global scale across the world, even normal students would enjoy learning much more and could learn at least twice as fast.

If we could install Team Viewer on any in class presentation computer, then visually impaired students could follow the slides on large screens and magnify them with Zoomtext instead of depending on heavy telescope glasses with high magnification, which is inevitably inversely proportional to their limited remaining visual field. This is because if the magnification needs to be increased, the remaining visual field unavoidably declines by the square of the same factor by which the magnification had to be increased. E.g. if one needs at least 4 times magnification to see the screen, one only has 4 * 4 = 1/16th of the visual field of normal students thus making it absolutely impossible to follow the small red laser pointer or the mouse.

Furthermore, projecting the professor’s presentation on every student’s computer right in front of their classroom seats would also greatly benefit normal students because each student could take over the mouse from the professor and point to areas of questions. Reversely, the professor could monitor how each student is progressing, especially regarding learning to use new software, from his desk. This technique has empowered me to learn using complex software, which was believed to be inaccessible to legally blind individuals because their remaining visual field is too small, due to the high required Zoomtext magnification, for viewing instructions and software applications simultaneously.

Moreover, each student could record the lecture and the changes on the screen while the professor is lecturing from his/her Power Point slides. See http://downloads.gufile.com/V1/debut-video-capture?gclid=CNDjm83unL4CFePm7Aoddz0ATw. Theoretically, Team Viewer and Skype could make classrooms obsolete.

Lecture materials can be made much more accessible to sensory and mobility impaired students simply by installing TeamViewer 5 and Skype on the instructor’s computer. TeamViewer 5 can be freely downloaded for non commercial use at http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/dyngate.aspx#version5

.

When using TeamViewer 5, visually impaired students are no longer challenged by the need to follow the presentations on the overhead projector using highly magnifying heavy telescopic glasses with very small remaining visual field because the lecture can be beamed on their large monitor directly in front of the students’ eyes in real time. Mobility impaired students no longer need to attend classes in person.

Subtitles can be added for the hearing impaired after the recorded lecture is stored online using the free software named Krut Computer Recorder (http://sourceforge.net/projects/krut/). No more physical appearance to office hours is necessary. Visually impaired students can interact with their instructors via their large screen and with their assistive technology. Natural speech recognition software is advancing rapidly thus soon allowing close captioning subtitles for the hearing impaired in real time. This method is also very suitable for one on one tutoring or working in small study groups.

My own experiences:

Without this remote teaching method my legal blindness would have prevented me from succeeding in my bioinformatics PhD program since I rapidly need to learn using new interfaces all the time but my visual impairment is preventing me from following general instructions given in the literature because they are written for a normal sighted audience. Since I am legally blind my learning efficiency has been severely limited by the extremely small remaining visual field causing me to easily get lost while navigating through unfamiliar user interfaces with high Zoomtext magnification (see http://www.aisquared.com/products). That is why I need somebody, who can walk me step by step through each unfamiliar and visually overwhelming user interface. Using TeamViewer 5 in combination with Zoomtext allows me to follow my tutor’s mouse with high magnification and they can verify that I am following the correct steps, procedures and workflows without being limited by my small visual field.

My tutors can be anywhere in the world. Common benefits remove separation between disabled and non handicapped students: Using TeamViewer 5 for lecturing has many advantages even for non handicapped students because –like their disabled peers – they can point to and highlight portions of the content and instructions to which they still have questions. Reversely, the instructor can look at the student’s steps to make sure that they follow the instructions correctly. Students can also demonstrate their work to the entire classroom without even having to leave their seats. This approach is becoming increasingly feasible because – at least most of my classrooms – have been equipped with computer screens right in front of each student’s seat. TeamViewer 5 could easily be installed on the server for the thin clients to which each student has access during lecture.

Since instructing with TeamViewer 5 and Skype has advantage for handicapped and non handicapped students alike, disabled students are no longer singled out by needing special accommodations setting them apart from their non disabled peers because they can work with the same setup as everyone else. Furthermore, using TeamViewer 5 and Skype has several advantages over blackboard for everyone because it allows editing uploaded documents by anyone simultaneously. Remote and flexible office hours are now also possible thus better accommodating the busy and often unexpectedly changing schedule of faculty, staff and students. Professors could even teach courses from home now.

This remote option helps blind, visually impaired and fully sighted people alike. For example, our ecology computer lab was only open 2-4 hours per day because there were not enough funds to pay the lab supervising student more. Fortunately, with TeamViewer I could use my lab computer remotely all the time because otherwise I would not have enough time to finish my lab assignments every week. Enhancing educational efficiency and knowledge transfer rate: This approach opens the door for many promising interesting comparative studies evaluating the effectiveness of remotely and in person taught classes and any combination of those components. Moreover, the collaboration of experts from different highly specialized disciplines is now feasible because – since most information is communicated via computer screen anyways – experts – regardless of their disability-induced limitations – could participate equally in online meetings everywhere, making it easier for disabled job seekers to better integrate into our increasingly competitive workforce, save transportation costs and break down informational silos that are still isolating experts across disciplines.

Conclusion:

Using these programs could make traditional classrooms obsolete because physical attendance is no longer necessary. However, direct personal interactions may still remain advantageous because they allow for forming stronger emotional interpersonal relationships than it would be possible when exclusively depending on remote communication interfaces. The same can be demonstrated with Smart Phones. Funding acknowledgement:

This project was supported by the Arkansas INBRE program, with grants from the National Center for Research Resources - NCRR (P20RR016460) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Prerequisites:

No prerequisites! It is so easy once people see it working in a demonstration. Participants should bring energy, excitement, questions, ideas, laptop, internet connection, curiosity and interest to play with these programs to maybe find them useful for something I have not yet even thought of.

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Let’s face it! Evolution, i.e. competing for scarce resources, i.e. competing for everything beneficial for life, such as food, water, mating partner, etc., not only occurs between species but also within species. We award scarce resources, such as jobs, money, education, healthcare, etc., based on competitive performance because there will never be enough to satisfy everyone’s needs/desires. Fortunately, a common consensus is developing; requiring everyone to perform above our arbitrarily defined minimal tolerance thresholds would unfairly discriminate against those lacking sufficient functional parameters, because their vision, hearing, emotions, cognition or mobility, etc. is too impaired. However, our arbitrary academic, professional and social standards have been developed assuming properly working functional parameters, which can therefore be considered as essential prerequisites. Consequently, people with insufficient essential prerequisites cannot adhere to our standards unless they will be provided with additional scarce resources, such as money, extra time, assistance etc., and/or be exempt from fulfilling certain unachievable requirements/standards, e.g. waiving the microscopy requirement for blind students. Higher education institutions are founded on Social-Darwinistic principles because their programs are designed such that not everyone can succeed. Hence, dropping out is generally a socially accepted consequence of negative Social–Darwinistic selection. This dilemma has probably inspired the mission of disability offices to prevent negative Social–Darwinistic selection due to insufficient essential prerequisites. But when is a certain functional parameter considered to be insufficient? This decision is subjective and arbitrary because the threshold line distinguishing disabled from non disabled is fuzzy and hence cannot be clearly defined. There are always the borderline cases of moderately visually impaired, hard of hearing, etc. referring to partially – but still somewhat insufficiently – functioning essential prerequisites.

Since it is common practice to arbitrarily draw a cutoff line or define a threshold somewhere, it will always be unfair for those, who just missed it by a tiny margin. Those people will be at a disadvantage when trying to adhere to our regular standards. Therefore, any kind of standardization is inevitably inherently discriminatory for some people. Moreover, many disabilities are probably not even discovered. E.g. 50 years ago I could not even request accommodations for ADHD and dyslexia. The main predicament is that our genome and its resulting functional parameters are not standardized but instead are spread across over a wide continuous spectrum but we are still requiring everyone to adhere to the same arbitrarily defined standards. Wouldn’t it therefore be fairer to use the individual maximum performance of a particular individual at any given time, as implicit, more appropriate, realistic and meaningful measurement for disability since it basically refers to effective functional limitations, because essentially we need to determine how much assistance is needed but NOT necessarily the extent by which the essential prerequisites are insufficient? Can variations in social circumstances and responsibilities, e.g. raising children, advanced age, etc. have the same adverse effects as disabilities? Shouldn’t we be more interested in maximizing individual performance rather than ranking it and defining arbitrary minimum performance thresholds below which negative Social–Darwinistic selection becomes inevitable?

It is my personal experiences that attitude, dedication and performance are much less direct consequences of free choices but instead are much more influenced by the concentration and combination of neurotransmitters and neuronal sensitivity because rapidly changing neurotransmitter concentrations has instantly caused my attitude to change from very lazy, lethargic, pessimistic and unmotivated to highly optimistic, innovative, creative, productive, driven and motivated within a few hours. Hence, my Individual maximum performance is simply the consequence of changes in neurotransmitter concentration. Accordingly, there should not be such thing as lazy people. There should only be people with variations in their neurotransmitter concentration. Hence, laziness could even be considered as a very mild form of depression.

Unfortunately, most people tend to be procedure–oriented because they believe the best way to make decisions is to adhere to a limited predefined inflexible set of rules that may be adequate for a limited number of foreseeable situations. But if unexpectedly an encountered real–live situation does not exactly resemble any of the limited number of predefined situations, then either it will be completely ignored because the predefined criteria are not considered to be met or the steps for the most similar seeming scenario will be followed allowing only for a suboptimal outcome. Way too few people are goal–oriented and have the courage to choose the best means to achieve a particular rational objective but those have been most helpful and influential in my life. Therefore, rules should be flexible and their strict application should be limited. Rules should be considered only as guidelines rather than inflexible dogmas set in stone. If all rules were applied as written I would have been victim to negative Social–Darwinistic selection long time ago and hence I fear – and therefore oppose – any kind of standardization.

Funding acknowledgement:

This project was supported by the Arkansas INBRE program, with grants from the National Center for Research Resources - NCRR (P20RR016460) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.