The Learn-Ed Homepage

Overview of Project

The principle objective of the project is to demonstrate that telecommunications technologies can assist students with disabilities to participate in the life of a University or Higher Education Establishment. This primary objective has the following sub-goals:

• To test new advanced multimedia network and telecommunications services for usability and usefulness, and to demonstrate the most important ones on local and wide area networks that are available to Higher Education Establishments.
• To develop and deploy new services and network technologies in the partner sites in Central Europe that take into account the research and experience that has been achieved in Western Europe.
• To encourage investment in new technologies and services that reflects the needs of students with disabilities.

The project will develop and test remote access techniques that can be used by students with disabilities. These will be based on the technologies most appropriate to the individual country. This will involve the installation of suitable pilot network infrastructures where these are not available, the adaptation of terminals so that they can be used with disabled students, and the development or deployment of services. The specific techniques developed within the project will be tested for their value to the students and compared with the possibilities currently available to them.

The impact of the project is expected to be:

• Cross fertilisation of knowledge between Western and Eastern Europe.
• Improvement in the access to the life of Higher Education Establishments for Students with Disabilities.
• Subsequent exploitation of the techniques by the Higher Education Establishments.
• Subsequent exploitation of the techniques by the industrial partners.
• Subsequent exploitation by other Higher Education Establishments and industrial companies to whom the work of the project will be disseminated.

Partners

• MicroCentre, University of Dundee, UK (Projektleitung)
• Department of Informatics, Comenius University Bratislava, SK
• Slovak Telecommunication, Bratislava, SK
• KFKI Research Institute for Measurement & Computing Techniques, Budapest, HU
• Zoltan Meszaros Company, Budapest, HU
• fortec, Research Group on Rehabilitation Technology, Vienna University of Technology