E-Learning Environment for Hearing Impaired Students.

The usage of technology within the educational department has become more vital by each year passing. One of the most popular technological approaches used is the e-learning environment. The usage of e-learning environment in education involves a wide range of types of students, and this includes the hearing impaired ones. Some adjustment or enhancement needs to be implemented within the e-learning environment, based on the needs or the adaptability of the hearing impaired students accordingly. This paper reviews some of the past researches on the usage of the e-learning environment for hearing impaired students for the past decade or so. INTRODUCTION There are a lot of disabled individuals who have the right to get the best education as they can get, just like their normal peers. Hearing impaired (HI) individuals are among those of people with disabilities that deserve the same rights. Hearing impaired individuals, particularly hearing impaired students, usually acquire the same level of mental capability as the normal hearing students in terms of studying. The term ‘deaf and dumb’ is not practically to be used since the hearing impaired students are only lacking of their hearing capability not their intelligence level (Schwartz, 2002). Therefore, they will be undertaking the same subjects or courses in any education departments or institutions as those taught to the normal hearing students of the same age. However, a problem could occur for the hearing impaired students if the technique used by the teachers or instructors in teaching them is as the same used for normal hearing students. Thus, the usage of technology is vital in preparing the HI students with appropriate learning environment, since by using technology, the HI students could access sound in their own suitable way (Berndsen & Luckner, 2010). E-learning environment is one of the most used techniques for educational purpose and this includes the education for HI students. However, most e-learning environment available does not particularly can be useful to those students due to its feature which is lacking in terms of adaptability. They often encounter problem in accessing the information available in terms of understanding it and using it in a proper manner (Fichten, Ferraro, Asuncion, Chwojka, Nguyen, Klomp & Wolforth, 2009). Therefore, in order to assist these HI students in accessing the information adequately, the e-learning environment needs to be developed and designed according to the needs of the HI students by adding or enhancing some features within the e-learning environment. DISCUSSION ON SELECTED PAPERS In this section, we present the review of past researches on the usage of the e-learning environment for hearing impaired students starting from the year 2005 until the year of 2012. Table 1 below shows the list of the studies related to the issue concerned. We begin the review with the brief explanation on the each study, followed by the approaches, limitations and also some valuable directions for future studies. Table 1: List of studies on the hearing impaired e-learning environment Author(s) Year Participants