Providing access to educational content for students with disabilities

The challenge

• Struggled to provide educational content that catered to the needs of students with intellectual developmental disabilities due to the language and reading-based nature of most learning management systems
• Educators faced challenges in maintaining student focus and engagement
• Students lacked access to personalized feedback and self-monitoring tools

Our students have intellectual developmental disabilities and, because of that, traditional ways of learning in college don’t work for them. The learning management systems that are available to college students are mostly language and reading-based. What we really love about CYPHER Learning^® is that our students are able to access educational content higher than their reading levels because we are able to integrate CYPHER's LMS with other plugins such as Read&Write so that we use text-to-speech software.

The solution

The graphic interface that CYPHER provides gives our students pictures and colors to go by, instead of just reading and reading lists of things, our students lose focus with that.

CYPHER allows us to really structure our lessons so that our students are familiar with what we start off with, what comes next, what’s expected of them, and when they’re done. Through this structure, we’re able to teach these students information that they typically wouldn’t be able to access outside of high school or even in high school.

Our students are able to self-monitor, not only do they know where they are, they know how they're doing. They get immediate feedback from their quizzes, they're able to learn because the quizzes show them what they got right and what they got wrong. They're able to go back and redo the quiz, which I believe is a deeper learning system for them. They're able to immediately correct their mistakes and learn from them.

We're able to watch our students move through the lessons and if they're not able to pass a lesson at the mastery level that we require, the students are able to go back through and retake quizzes. They're also able to take a look at a progress bar, see where they are in the class and where they are throughout the whole semester.

Features

• Human connection: You can connect with your friends on CYPHER, so if you have a question you can ask your friends to help as well. CYPHER has a way to connect you to your instructor so if you have a question you can ask her: “Hey, can you help me with this?” and she can go into CYPHER and change it for you - Mackenzie, Student
• Quizzes: What I like about CYPHER is that we can go back over our notes and learn about what we got wrong on the quizzes, what we don't know, and what we need to know for our midterm. After you're done doing the quiz, before you push finish, you're able to go back over it and answer with a different answer before you push finish. That shows you a result, shows you which ones you got wrong and the correct answer. All of that really helps me out a lot - Kyle, Student
• Content development: To be able to take a look at a course and go: well, maybe this section should be first, and literally drop and drag a section has been remarkable. The way that the pages look, I think it is very engaging for our students. We're able to pull out bits and pieces from the videos that they watch. Their content is in video format, but we scaffold their content and their learning through the vocabulary, the images, and pre-teaching visual analogies. It makes for a stronger and deeper learning experience for our students, but to be able to access something like this from a personal standpoint, to build something that is so meaningful for our students and to use this to build our curriculum has been a wonderful process for us as a program and for me individually - Cathi Allen, Executive Director

The results

• Integrations with plugins such as Read&Write enables text-to-speech functionality, allowing students to access educational content beyond their reading levels
• CYPHER's graphic interface provides visual cues such as pictures and colors, enhancing student engagement and focus
• Students receive immediate feedback on quizzes, allowing them to identify areas of strength and weakness and make corrections accordingly

The Inclusive Higher Education Certificate Program is really excited to be able to share our findings with other people about how we're using a graphic interface for students with intellectual disabilities. As far as we know, we are the only group in the nation who's able to bring in students through a Zoom process of video conferencing so that our students from literally four hundred miles away are able to join us in our classroom and learn at a higher level beyond high school.