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Dr. Sheri Hutchinson, North Hennepin Community College

The dreaded reading assignment is a hallmark for students enrolled in higher education courses. Open educational resources provide an opportunity to save students the cost of textbooks. Reading assignments now send students to websites or open source online textbooks. Sometimes faculty members will write their own materials and provide the content as a PDF or HTML document in their school’s Learning Management System (LMS).

In 2011, the school where I teach integrated a text-to speech-solution (TTS), called ReadSpeaker to read documents and PDF’s, plus more, in the content area of the Brightspace LMS. Now, we are testing the new product TextAid to read outside websites and other content. The TTS does not require any downloads for students. With a simple click, students can listen and follow along with the highlighted content to the online materials posted. In addition, commuter students — or those who are always on the go and need to listen to their course materials offline — can download an MP3 and listen to online course content on their mobile devices. Since this technology was added, fewer questions and fewer comments about content materials happen in my classes.

A number of studies have been conducted regarding this type of learning, which is called bimodal learning. Bronwyn Disseldorp and Dianne Chambers (2002) found that with bimodal learning, students were better able to comprehend what they had read (2002). According to the research, specific benefits of bimodal content presentation include:

• Improved word recognition skills and vocabulary
• Improved reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and concentration
• Improved information recall and learning/memory enhancement

Some of the lesser-known and considered benefits include:

• Increased motivation and more positive attitude with regard to reading
• Increased confidence in reading skills and perceived performance
• Relief from reading fatigue

When incorporating new technology, some of the key elements of success include:

• Simple to use, no downloads, no training to get started
• Easy integration into the LMS
• Hours of coding and expert installation not required
• Versatile and stable solution
• SAS, software as a solution-cloud hosted

Distance education has long suffered from a high attrition rate and lower success rates than classroom-based courses. If self-efficacy can be improved for a student who can speak English but struggles to read and write well, then when will more schools take a look at their distance education attrition rates and integrate a solution to support these students? We protect the privacy of students with documented disabilities, but what about the privacy of students struggling to read. If we were to embrace diversity in schools, wouldn’t one task be to at least consider the possibility that diverse populations require universally designed and accessible content? This includes integrating support into a school’s LMS to provide text-to-speech technology for written text—along with the captioning of videos, which is already a requirement.

A colleague has stated that, like me, she has a 94 percent success rate in online classes after adding TTS. My most recent summer computer security course boasts a similar online success rate. It is time to devote more study to just what happens to students when TTS is integrated into a school’s LMS.

References

Disseldorp, B., and Chambers, D. (2002). “Independent Access: Which students might benefit from a talking computer?” and “Selecting the Right Environment for Students in a Changing Teaching Environment: A Case Study,” presented at the meeting of the Australian Society for Educational Technology (ASET) International Conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2002. S. McNamara and E. Stacey (Eds) “Untangling the Web: Establishing Learning Links” presented at the ASET International Conference in Melbourne in 2002.