Blended Learning in Personalized Assistive Learning Environments

In this paper, the special needs/requirements of disabled students and cost-benefits for applying blended learning in Personalized Educational Learning Environments (PELE) in Higher Education are studied. The authors describe how blended learning can form an attractive and helpful framework for assisting Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (D-HH) students to learn and communicate. The described blended learning experiment integrates face-to-face, synchronous, and asynchronous e-learning, bilingual teaching (oral language and Sign Language) in the mainstream class, teaching in parallel classes, and personalized access to distributed databases of educational material. At the core of PELE, the authors use Multimedu, a web-based tailored made tool for disabled students. This experimental tool includes applications of a traditional Learning Management System (LMS), supporting a multilingual dictionary of terms, multimedia management and social networking. Finally, this paper describes the use of the blended e-learning model in “Database I” course, given at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece.