Answering the challenge of inclusive education is however a complex process. The teachers are confronted to a multitude of children profiles, as every pupil is unique. This diversity should be encouraged however in terms of learning skills, interests and motivation, the discrepancies from a pupil to another is a challenge in order to promote equal opportunities given by education. To be inclusive, the school should be multiple and collaborative, and the teachers should be committed to the success of a universal pedagogy. This supposes major changes in the structuring of schools and classrooms, regarding pedagogy and learning environment, aiming at ensuring that all children feel supported to be able to develop their full capacity. Towards this challenge, Universal Design for Learning, by understanding the way of people are learning, is giving flexibility and personalised learning to all. From experience, this concept has shown potential for inclusive education, especially because nowadays, at the level of regular classrooms, the teachers face pupils with learning issues at different level. We count around 1 child on 5 that presents learning disabilities including only the children that have been diagnosed. Besides, early school classes have the constraint of having children under stage of development that can highly differ from one child to another. Promoting flexible learning opportunities for inclusion in regular classroom, not considering the stigma of disabilities, is a great opportunity to enhance the capacity of primary schools to fulfil their mission of committing the children into the education process. In that context, the AILE project is designed to provide teachers with better educational opportunities for the integration of all pupils aged between 6 and 10 years old in order to meet each individual learning requirements to improve the educational development and give equal opportunities for all children. This global objective will be reached using a breakthrough educational web-based solution to enable teachers creating their own regular learning contents and pedagogical activity, in an adapted and interactive way, thanks to a list of adaptations started through the ALSO Erasmus + project. Through this project, AILE aims at answering to three objectives: i) give a concrete opportunity to the teachers to create, from a unique template, several adapted materials depending on the children’s needs, ii) promote easy inclusive education to motivate teachers and iii) promote a collaborative pedagogy with and without schools for inclusion. To achieve this goal, AILE will implement a breakthrough methodology and solution based on: (1) An in-depth assessment of the end-user’s requirements and needs compared to the opportunities given by UDL to implement concrete digital solutions towards inclusive education, (2) The creation of a large database of adaptations to the children needs, to offer new opportunity of alternative learning pathways, (3) The release of a breakthrough web-based solution, enabling all teachers to create, from their own material, adapted learning interactive contents, compared to their pupils’ profiles, (4) A complete assessment of the solution, and a replication plan towards institutions, schools, teachers, families and supportive organisations such as language therapists. The AILE project will be coordinated by Haikara, a digital agency based in France that will bring to the project its expertise acquired through the ALSO project funded by the Erasmus + programme and referred as a “Best practices” projet recently by the European Commission. In addition, Haikara will be supported by 4 renown partners: (1) CEFES, Center for Studies and Training for Specialized and Inclusive Education, with the mission is to help and support the person with disabilities and their family, (2) Ecole2Demain, gathering a high level of knowledge and competencies to develop a new qualitative policy focused on pedagogy and adaptive learning (3) ICEP Europe, Institute of Child Education and Psychology Europe, independent training and research institute specialised in psychology and special educational needs (4) Orthocentre, speech therapists, specialised in adapted and inclusive learning pathways. Thanks to these activities, the AILE project will have significant impacts on major challenges in the EU framework related to school education, especially i) increasing the capability of teachers to provide adapted learning contents, ii) developing collaboration mind-set between all stakeholders inside and outside the classroom, including therapists and families, iii) reducing school drops through better motivation and learning experience of children.
Our objective with AILE is to develop our research in the field of school adaptations to be offered to students with special needs but also, within the framework of Universal Pedagogy, to all students in classes; and thus to validate the relevance of making available to teachers and other stakeholders an adaptive pedagogical platform, based on the principles of AUC, allowing to adapt the contents according to the specific needs of the children This final objective therefore builds on many intermediate objectives: - To understand the operational expectations of teachers and other stakeholders, the levers to be used and the obstacles and constraints to be taken into account. - To define the adaptations to be implemented, according to the needs of the children and the possibilities offered by a computer tool - To design and produce a complete educational platform, allowing to manage the assignment of content to children, to manage the personalization of this content, and to preserve the progress of the child in its course - To script and produce educational content for children - To present and test the use of the platform in different contexts - To adapt the platform in English to test the functioning and the principles in another language, and to study the replicability of the project.
This project originated from a combination of several elements. On the one hand, the observation that despite a policy advocating inclusion in European countries, teachers are often helpless and overwhelmed to fully take into account the specific needs of children. In addition, there is a lack of training on how to take into account the needs of children, and little knowledge of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an educational approach that aims to take into account the needs of all children. On the other hand, we were able to validate during another European project - ALS - the relevance of proposing an adaptive digital tool, i.e. an interactive pedagogical tool whose form and principles of interactivity can be parameterized according to the needs of children. These two observations led us to propose the AILE project: to validate the relevance of providing teachers with a tool to accompany them in the context of inclusion, so that they can offer children content that automatically adapts to each child's profile. This tool could facilitate the work of teachers in the context of inclusion, accompanying and simplifying their work to take into account the needs of all their students. The main objective of this tool is therefore to - Allow students to access adaptive educational content, which takes into account their specific needs in an individualized and personalized way - Enable teachers to easily deploy personalized content to an entire class, by specifying at the profile level the adaptations to be applied for each child. The platform also allows to be a place where all the stakeholders of the children's education meet: parents, speech therapists, etc. Finally, even if it is a tool for the teacher and the accompanying persons, the child is the final user. The platform must therefore allow children to access a variety of educational content with a skill-based approach, in a fun and rewarding environment.