 |
|
Projects
Net4Voice
Through the European Union's Lifelong Learning Programme, A project team led by the Universita di Bologna, University of Southampton, and Universität Ulm will explore how applications of speech recognition technology impact educational accessibility and increase lifelong learning opportunities.
As outlined by the European Union in the WebPage “Learning: anytime, anywhere for everyone” http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/edutra/index_en.htm, modern, effective education and training systems are vital to a vast array of social dimensions from economic competitiveness to social inclusion. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) are part of the answer, improving traditional education and providing flexible learning solutions to people throughout their life.
Starting from these assumptions, Net4Voice considers education in traditional classroom as still the most pervasive way to support learning. Nevertheless, there are needs related to accessibility / learning effectiveness that are not properly satisfied in traditional classrooms. Traditional face to face (F2F) education, although extremely important and unique, presents constraints due to physical, temporal, cultural barriers that could hinder access to learning.
Target Objectives:
To build up excellence centres for the development and delivery of innovative learning and teaching process and methods within the European Community. It aims at strengthen the European Community worldwide competitiveness.
The final project aim is to promote research into barrier free learning environments by facilitating development of EU centres that develop innovative learning processes and methods based on the Liberated Learning concept. The project will study how students and instructors from various educational settings can benefit from the exploitation of novel technologies through various accessible rich multimedia.
Target Results:
- To exploit speech recognition technologies as a new teaching modality capable of facilitating the accessible delivery of lesson content;
- To integrate real time speech recognition transcription, to deliver information through various integrated formats, such as audio, text and video, and different channel delivery;
- To evaluate and report the impact of the Liberated Learning concept and the technology on students with disabilities, non-disabled students, faculty/instructors, and other stakeholders;
- To analyse the proper mix of support technologies, such as microphone, pc characteristics, and so on, in order to best support various target users;
- To extend a technology initially created for people with disabilities, to non-disabled people;
- To test speech recognition technologies not only in Higher educational contexts, but also in different educational contexts, by testing and evaluating a novel scheme for knowledge sharing;
- To elaborate a scheme and method for delivering and disseminating results deriving from Liberated Learning experimentation.
In the first year the project team will test Liberated Learning speech recognition technologies in higher educational contexts and at least one other educational context, such as a school, adult education or vocational training organization. In particular, the first year will focus on generic issues related with learning approaches. In particular, testing will consider three different languages as a reference, representative of different learning models: Italian, English and German.
In the second year, experimentation results will be evaluated and a methodology to disseminate newly acquired knowledge will be developed. Moreover, access to a content rich Intranet environment will be enlarged to other European Community Stakeholders;
Partner – Roles
European partners in this Lifelong Learning Programme are:
Università di Bologna is the managing partner of Net4Voice. For more information about Net4Voice, please contact:
Dr Luca Garlaschelli
email: luca.garlaschelli@unibo.it
Dr Raffaella Primiani
email: raffaella.primiani@unibo.it
Dr Anna Violi
email: anna.violi@unibo.it
|
 |
