Special Education Teachers’ Attitude toward the IEP-integrated Resource Room e-Learning System

Abstract

Researches have shown that students receiving special education can potentially benefit through the use of multimedia courseware. However, traditional Internet-based multimedia web sites or e-Learning systems usually suffer from the problem of long transmission latency. On the other hand, multimedia contents that install and present in local computer usually lack of the capabilities of adapting to users with different characteristics. The Resource Room Learning Management System” (LMS) was proposed to overcome the dilemma. The idea is to distribute and operate the LMS in Resource Room’s LAN environment so that the multimedia contents can be accessed with less delay. Multimedia contents are then shared and exchanged through a centralized repository. The LMS system adopted is SCORM-compliant in order to facilitate contents sharing and management. It is easy to install and manage so that it would not impose too much extra burden onto resource room teachers. It is adaptive so that it would be easily configured or modified to fit into versatile resource room environments. In addition, efforts have also been working on integrating a computerized IEP (Individualized Educational Program) system that we developed separately. Such an IEP-embedded LMS can customize itself to fit each individual student’s unique learning requirements. A prototype of such system was first released on late 2003. Since then, we have been improving the system and given a number of demonstrations to special education teachers in several occasions. Currently, it is also under small-scale field testing. The purposes of this paper are to report the current status of the system and special education teachers’ responses we have received so far on this system.