The Future of Education

Lockdown in Italy begun just two weeks after the beginning of the second academic semester. As a Sign Language (SL) teacher, it has meant transferring my teaching abilities to an online setting, with a short notice period, high stress in my students and myself and a whole lot of uncertainty about the length of the situation and adaptation as well. However, having to teach SL in online settings has also meant putting all of my theoretical knowledge about online education in practice, in a context where available e-learning platforms (such as Microsoft Teams) showed their limits in terms of multiple video management and web-conference platforms (Zoom, among others) showed potentials for a better management of the learning situation for SL. Sign Language education in online setting is not a new topic in language education (see Efhimiou et al, 2004, among others), but doing so without a dedicated platform is what makes this a new experience. In a context where learning is still forced into the barriers of distant education and learning and a visual-gestural language is involved, I will report the experience gained in teaching sign language in online settings to academic students. Specific reference to training adaptation, preparation of extra materials, integration with online resources and copyright will be brought into discussion, comparing this to previous experiences in e-learning settings. Results from this comparison will be presented to trace a line and learn from this experience, towards (near) future SL education in online settings.

Keywords: sign language, online education, adult education, lockdown.

References:
[1] Efthimiou E., Sapountzaki G., Karpouzis K., Fotinea SE. (2004) Developing an e-Learning Platform for the Greek Sign Language. In: Miesenberger K., Klaus J., Zagler W.L., Burger D. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3118. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
[2] Gulli, T., Volterra, V. (2020), La comunità sorda segnante italiana all’epoca del coronavirus: lingua dei segni e accessibilità. MicroMega Online, http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/la-comunita-sorda-segnante-italiana-all-epoca-del-coronavirus-lingua-dei-segni-e-accessibilita/, last visit: May 18th, 2020.