This is Alex with yet another (one may even say, weekly) update.
This week has taken a sharp turn in direction from our previous three weeks. We started our work with familiarizing ourselves with Objective-C, Xcode, and the iPad; Our research was focused nearly 100 percent on programming. During week 3, we began to develop and eventually finalized a set of questions to aid us in interviewing our focus groups. We developed two completely open-ended sets of questions, one for each of the "college professor" and "high school/middle school teacher" focus groups.
For the "college student" focus group, we had to make a survey. Due to the sheer volume of students who we plan to interview, an open-ended questionnaire just would not work. Students are the main customer for our eventual product, so it is important to interview as many of them as possible. We first formulated a series of questions similar in format to the questions given to the two other focus groups. After this, the team read up on the art of survey creation. To anyone who has ever thought to themselves, "Oh, all I have to do is make a survey? That'll sure be easy!", let me provide you with these words of wisdom: You're wrong. Choosing the right questions, phrasing, and types of questions was much harder than I initially expected; We went through several revisions before we finally settled on a good survey format with some good, unbiased questions. We plan to start distributing the survey to the masses shortly.
We also conducted lots of interviews this week! I heard back from a lot of my current and former professors and high school teachers, nearly all of whom expressed an interest in the project. Lindsey also heard back from many of her professors and teachers, so I got to meet some new faces in addition to reuniting with some familiar ones. Lindsey and I collected a lot of data from the professors and teachers who responded, and there are still more interviews to come in the upcoming week.
The general gist that I got from the interviews, was that most professors and teachers...
- Were very open to the possibility of using our technology
- Expressed a view that AL had a lot of potential to help visually impaired students in their classes.
- Would be willing to change certain aspects of their teaching methodologies in order to accommodate students who would be using AL
- Have had experience working with at least one visually impaired student in the past, and were very comfortable and accommodating to these students.
In-terms of the last bullet, most members of the focus group stated that the visually impaired students they worked with were able to (mostly) overcome their disability and generally succeed in their courses. However, many professors admitted that the visually impaired students whom they worked with did not succeed as well as they could have; It was the general consensus that a piece of technology like AL would have given these students the opportunity to succeed more. In addition, all of those interviewed have expressed interest and openness to using AL.
I would like to personally thank everyone who allowed us to interview them, as well as our team for coming up with some great interview/survey methods. I once heard a quote that went something like this: "The decision that a committee reaches is guaranteed to be no greater than a decision reached by any one of its individual members." At the time, I laughed at that quote because I thought it was true; This week and last week have proved me (happily) wrong. Our research most certainly would not have been going as smoothly without all three of us working together, and I consider myself lucky to be a part of such a great team.
Until next week...
- Alex
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