Recursos tecnológicos como ferramentas pedagógicas para estudantes surdos na Educação a Distância

Abstract

Nowadays, despite the inclusion policies, the number of students in online education is still low due to the difficulties they face in this modality. With the aim of contributing for promoting inclusion, this study had as main objective to investigate technological resources as pedagogical tools for deaf students in online education. We undertook qualitative field research through interview and questionnaires as data collection instruments. Participants were deaf students from the online course of Linguistics-Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), their hearing classmates, instructor, translator and course coordinator, in a higher education institution in Teresina – Piauí (Brazil). Data were analyzed qualitatively and through quantification using descriptive statistics, and indicated that deaf students face a lot of difficulties to fully comprehend the course material in Portuguese. There is a need for resources and pedagogical materials translated to Libras, in order to support their learning. From this diagnosis, we proposed to transform the printed course material, currently only available in Portuguese, in e-books formatted as a website (blog style), with an automatic Libras translator integrated. In order to illustrate the solution, a prototype was developed using the automatic translator officially adopted by the Brazilian government, VLibras, available for free. The prototype was evaluated by the participants from the Linguistics – Libras course, who freely used the resource and gave their opinions through an online questionnaire with embedded videos to translate each item, produced by the teacher and translator of the course. The prototype was evaluated as easy to use and perceived as very useful to broaden effective inclusion of deaf students in online education. However, deaf students preferred the videos with the human translator, given the technical limitations of automatic translation, which still needs to evolve. In spite of that, the scalability of the technological resource proposed strengthens its potential as a tool for inclusion.