A community approach to the development of widgets to support personalised learning for disabled students

The rapid pace of change of the knowledge intensive era, supported by the emergence of Web2.0 and the consequential growth of personalised applications, has fuelled debate on the notion of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). The concept of personalisation, adaptability and accessibility is particularly pertinent in terms of creating a learning environment that meets the individual needs of disabled learners that cannot be met by standard approaches and could affect the student’s ability to access learning at all. This has led us to explore the potential of the personalised development of learning applications to provide the choice of tools, applications or services to support the learning experience of disabled students. This paper examines a community approach to the design, development and evaluation of open source widgets, through a project funded as part of the JISC Distributed Learning Environments initiative: Widgets for Inclusive Distributed Environments (WIDE).