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Discussion Points on September 13, 2006
Comment 1: Expert Panel - I'd like to add Ken Petri with payment to the QA list of experts. The total panel would include the experts you identified, as well as Dan Kelly and Ken. We do not have dollars to pay Ken so can you budget? Response 1: Yes. I will budget for Ken. Let's discuss on the 20th. ---------- Comment 2: "I'm not sure if we have enough students involved to adequately test 10 different AT applications..." Response 2: Actually, we are not testing the AT applications themselves since they have already proven to be effective in accommodating the access needs of thousands of students with disabilities. We are testing and demonstrating the benefits of providing students with access to free, easily installable, easily-transportable, easily supportable, high-quality AT applications in support of improving academic achievement and transitioning more seamlessly to college/employment. Our target audience is students with disabilities who are, for whatever reason, precluded from purchasing, receiving, accessing, using, transitioning, or continuing to use commercial AT. While commercial AT contributes, significantly, to enhancing the quality-of-life, independence and employability of millions of students with disabilities... many parents, social organizations, schools and government agencies can not afford to purchase it. Further more, there are many additional situations that preclude students with disabilities from accessing, using or continuing to use commercial AT. For example, when K-12 schools purchase AT for use by their students... the schools own the AT. This situation precludes students from being able to take the "school's AT" home with them to complete homework assignments... or to their local libraries to enable them study and surf the web with their friends. When students graduate from high school they no longer have access to the AT that contributed to their success and independence as part of their K-12 education. The ability for high school students with disabilities to transition from high school to college, or into work environments, can also be negatively impacted by having to "start all over again" to acquire the AT they need. Access Tomorrow can eliminate many of these problems. It is for this reason that the Access Tomorrow philosophy is EVOLUTIONARY. It is affording us the opportunity to develop, evolve, propogate and create a self-sustaining AT user communities of students with disabilities who are not currently benefitting from the use of appropriate AT. ---------- Comment 3: Why would the mentors & parents want to use the AT? Response 3: Students using the SmartDrives will be able to take them home. It makes sense (at least on the surface) to provide parents (assuming active roles in their children's education) the opportunity to learn about and use the new AT their children have access to. All parents will not fall into this category. We can simply support interested and proactive parents. ---------- Comment 4: Cost of Smart Drives. Who is going to pay for the smart drives to load the applications to? This would come out of OSU's supply budget and we did not allocate dollars in this line item for 300 - 400 smart drives? Response 4: OSU will not need to purchase any SmartDrives. It will not be necessary to purchase 300-400 smart drives in order for our project to be deemed successful. IDEAL has budgeted the purchase of 50 SmartDrives. The SmartDrives themselves serve the purpose of distributing AT in an economical, easy-to-use manner. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method of distribution one only needs to "test" 5-10 SmartDrives. It's no different than testing any other PC add-on like hard drives, Keyboards, memory sticks or remote mice. We have budgeted to test 50 SmartDrives which is really overkill. Once it is demonstrated that the SmartDrives work we have proven the doability of what I describe in Point #3. The fact that we are not going to distribute 300-400 SmartDrives will have no negative impact on our project. We will have proven that the technology side of Access Tomorrow works. This does not change the fact that a majority of our funding is being invested in making it possible to distribute, install, access, use and configure high-quality AT applications using the U3 SmartDrive method of distribution. ---------- Comment 5: Finally - the focus groups. We've written into the grant that we would select AT applications based on user input. I don't think we've done an adequate job of verifying that our 10 applications are indeed the choices of our students/stakeholders. Asking our expert panel would be a biased sample, since they are the developers in many cases. Response 5: The sentence above eludes to two, distinctly different, types of testing.
Testing how effective a particular AT application is as it relates to an
individual student. Testing whether or not we have selected the "best" free AT applications to distribute on the SmartDrive. Asking our expert panel should not cause bias problems since the experts are simply being asked to determine if there are any "better" free AT applications out there than the one's IDEAL selected to distribute on SmartDrives. This type of evaluation is completely different from asking a Jaws user/supporter to compare Jaws to WindowEyes or asking a Magic user to compare Magic to ZoomText Xtra. In these instances I can see biases negatively impact opinion... but this is not what we are doing. I agree that we need to make sure we cover the LD area as well - any suggestions? I suggest asking the developers of the AT to put us in contact with some of their current users. The same holds true for students who are deaf. We can simply ask the NexTalk developer to put us in contact with some of their users. However, I believe that students at OSD will love NexTalk and, for this reason, there may be no need to contact anyone outside of OSD. ---------- Comment 6: Annual Budget. In terms of payment on deliverables, we need to keep the budget aligned by years - We have $67K in Year 1 - and 60K in yr. 2. Although we are being encouraged by OSURF to structure our subcontract in this manner, we cannot deviate from our annual budget allocations by more than a small percentage. Response 6: We can work through the above constraints with no problems. |
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