Title: The success platform
Course: UDL & online special education > Section: 6. The Success4all platform

Some students, due to disabilities or other conditions, require additional needs and the UDL method also proposes personalized plans for these students by clearly defining specific objectives, strategies and activities to achieve these objectives.

Il progetto SUPPORTING SUCCESS FOR ALL

Students with special needs and/or disabilities are among those who normally suffer the most during periods of lockdown in Europe and around the world. The adjustment process that all students had to go through was certainly much more difficult for them who were, in many cases, deprived of the crucial peer contact and pedagogical support they previously enjoyed. This situation has weighed on the boys but even more on their families who have often felt abandoned.

Starting from this experience, some important European organizations have joined together in a project to create a valid methodological and IT support system to help who was forced, despite himself, to distance learning. Therefore students with disabilities or special needs, their families, support teachers of all levels, therapists and operators are the categories to which the project is aimed.

The European project SUCCESS – “Supporting success for all – Universal design principles in digital learning for students with disabilities” – is funded under the agreement of the ERASMUS+ Program number 2020-1-PL01- KA226-SCH-095777. The project runs between March 2021 and February 2023.

The project is based, in its entirety, on 6 official and 5 associated partners from 7 EU countries. Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), the Polish computing infrastructure and research center for science, coordinates the project and is the main technology partner. Casa Santa Rosa, an Italian rehabilitation center in Rome and part of an internationally spread charity organization, play the role of link between the project activities and people with disabilities, their families, and caregivers.< br>

The University of Rome La Sapienza (Italy), the National University of Athens for Technologies (Greece), the Polytechnic University of Porto ( Portugal), and the Lithuanian University of Medical Sciences (Lithuania) are the academic partners of the project due to their link with:

1) schools, through their institutional role as providers of teacher training courses

2) caregivers, through their hospitals and medical schools as well as their vocational rehabilitation training programs in rehabilitation schools

3) companies and realities operating in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector applied to innovation through their activities of research in this field

4 more universities from SPAIN joined the project after its start as associated partners: the Autonomous University of Madrid, the of Granada, the University of Salamanca and the University Rey Juan Carlos.

Finally, GEANT (Netherlands), the pan-European research and education network, also supports the initiative.

The Success4all platform

During the COVID-19 crisis in all countries of the world, the situation of students with disabilities and/or special needs has been one of the most critical due to the need for rapid and radical changes in already complex circumstances. The SUCCESS project “Promoting success for all – Universal Design Principles in Digital Learning for students with disabilities” aims to support teachers and family/caregivers working with students during lockdowns, when digital tools and distance learning is the only means of communication available for attending lessons and interacting with peers.

The project provides web applications (such as a learning platform, website and others) mainly for students with disabilities, their teachers, caregivers and therapists. The project also communicates with such target groups in various ways to achieve its research goals. Currently it has already produced guidelines and a self-learning online course based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning, as well as an e-learning platform and a networking center capable of supporting the work of teachers and family/caregivers whenever needed. These actions also include scientific research into the needs of students with disabilities and/or special needs.

The project is aimed at special needs (for example the automated reading of texts on the screen) which are common to many categories of students who require support and not exclusively to those students who are recognized by law as “students with disabilities”. The core of the project consortium consists of 6 institutions including research centres, universities and an NGO. They represent 5 European partner nations of the project: Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal. The consortium is strengthened by its associated partners: some universities from Spain, the pan-European association GEANT, and several schools.

Success Moodle

The platform in use has already produced this training course on UDL as the first objective of training and promotion of the research project. The course will be distributed and disseminated by the partners in the main school training systems in the areas and forms envisaged by the nations participating in the project and according to the agreements obtained from the national collaborator and promoter partners. The courses, consequently, will be able to have a recognition of credits for students in university training and a recognition as refresher courses for teachers, teaching professionals, therapists and the rest of the defined beneficiaries, in addition to providing a certification once the lessons and planned activities have been carried out.

In addition to this training course on UDL, other courses are already in the process of development which will be subsequently published and which will concern other aspects of interest. These courses are all included in the Success Moodle platform, even if some of the teaching materials will be available externally through publication in OERs, following an open source policy aimed at making the various research products financed with public and EU funds usable for society .

The advantages of the Moodle platform lie in the possibility of adding to the constructivist methodological principles that originated it, the necessary technological tools to be integrated in order to allow the realization of pedagogical strategies of the UDL. Success Moodle is a platform conceived starting from the open source tools integrated in previous Up2U projects as a European response to ensure the existence of accessible and free resources for teachers with the aim of guaranteeing the quality of teaching, so that it is height of the current context and future challenges.

Success Moodle adds the goal of inclusiveness. This purpose implies offering not only a Moodle environment designed for inclusive pedagogical work or the production of training courses, but the necessary training for the use of technologies and the exemplification of how they are applied. From the reuse of existing material in the public domain and with clear educational value to the creation and production of new material, to the enhancement of old material through the digitization process or the transformation into dynamic and interactive material. Consequently, some aspects that have been illustrated in this course for a basic training, will have a further more in-depth development within other courses until the objectives defined by the project are achieved.