Liberated Learning: A University/Corporate Partnership with Global Reach

By Judy Karasik
Posted April 6, 2005

“We all believe that someday this will be everywhere, as ubiquitous as a blackboard.”

Liberated Learning is an automated captioning system that enables teachers’ lectures to appear on a screen as they speak. Students can read as the professor talks and, at the end of the session, the system provides a text transcript and multimedia notes available on line after speech recognition errors have been edited out of the system. This alternative to conventional note-taking for students with disabilities also provides help to non-disabled students—they, too, can use the final notes and can benefit from having a visual lecture as well as an auditory one. The tool assists a range of learners, including typically-abled, quadriplegics, second language learners, students with learning disabilities and people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The Atlantic Centre at Saint Mary's University

The software application was first created by researchers at The Atlantic Centre of Research, Access, and Support for People with Disabilities at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, whose mission since 1985 has been to strengthen access to education for people with disabilities. Atlantic Center Director David Leitch says that people with disabilities “are marginalized in higher education, and exhausted by the time they get there. We have always recognized that our goal - to change the environment instead of the person - could be greatly advanced with technology.”

Close Working Relationship with IBM

In 2001 Saint Mary’s had the option of turning over the nascent software prototype to scientists at IBM’s Research for next generation development. IBM, who had demonstrated leadership in speech-to-text projects, saw a range of possibilities in the application. Dimitri Kanevsky was a key visionary for the project at IBM and Sara Basson was involved from the start. Liberated Learning and IBM agreed to a close working relationship.

IBM received invaluable user requirements from Saint Mary’s. With the leadership of software architect Alexander Faisman, the company created ViaScribe. IBM established a Joint Study with Saint Mary’s through the Liberated Learning Consortium. Through this agreement, which has been renewed annually for several years, Via Scribe has been free for use by consortium partners. Together the group continues to test it, explore new uses, and make improvements.

In this way, Liberated Learning has become a living laboratory for world-renowned IBM computer scientists. Liberated Learning tests the software and lets IBM know what works and what doesn’t work. When IBM fixes the problem, Liberated Learning asks for new improvements to the software.

The partners work closely. Atlantic Center’s International Manager Keith Bain exchanges e-mails with IBM scientists several times a day. He is the primary conduit transmitting learning and challenges to IBM from Saint Mary’s far-flung university and corporate partners.

Dr. Sara Basson, the primary contact, advocate, and manager for the project at IBM, is both passionate and pragmatic. Basson believes that increasing access for people with disabilities is a “calling.” She is a canny and determined product developer who knows how to market, persuade, and position, both within the corporation and to external audiences.

University and Corporate Partners from Halifax to the USA to Australia

The project has grown—with higher education outposts in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Liberated Learning has applications in a Canadian museum and with the RBC Financial Group, Canada’s largest financial group. In addition, Liberated Learning will announce Japanese and Chinese partners this April. The Memorandum of Agreement is signed between Saint Mary’s and these new partners who need to be prepared to absorb some costs, although pulling out of the project is not difficult. Liberated Learning would rather have willing partners than institutions which don’t see this as a priority.

Each partner site uses the technology for slightly different purposes, so each is a laboratory exploring and testing a distinct capability of the technology.

• Murdoch University, in Perth, has used the technology in a first-year Foundation course and a business course, reaching out to students with disabilities and students for whom English is not a first language.
• RBC Financial Group is exploring how IBM ViaScribe could be applied within the organization for corporate training and e-learning applications. To try out the technology and promote the initiative, the February’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Halifax used real time captioning services from the project,demonstrating “its potential as an equalizing force.”
• At Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Nova Scotia, a group is developing applications to be used by museum tour guides and on informational kiosks.
• The University of the Sunshine Coast and the Australian National University initiated development of a network version of the Liberated Learning technology, which will be integrated into the Teaching and Learning technology in all teaching spaces on campus, and linked to computerized timetabling and WebCT internet access.

Saint Mary’s provides technical support to all sites, but some forms are difficult to deliver to locations that are twelve or more hours away. Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast provides leadership for sites in that part of the world and provides phone and other immediate product support to five institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

Universal Design for a Wide Audience

Both at IBM and at Saint Mary’s, project leaders recognize that the project needs to appeal to a wide audience in order to succeed.

David Leitch comments, “If you are developing a technology for a niche it is harder to get the necessary funding because of costs and specifically the return on the financial investment. Instead the technology must have broad appeal before it goes full circle and is available to a smaller niche market.” Sara Basson puts the emphasis somewhat differently, saying, “Technology designed to assist a particular group of students with special needs ends up benefiting all students.”

Lessons of Collaboration

David Leitch comments that perhaps the biggest success of the project is that they have developed and sustained relationships with so many universities and IBM. What keeps the collaboration connected and lively?

• Mutual interest and benefits are clear. Powerful symbiosis keeps energy and enthusiasm high. Through this arrangement, IBM acquires teams around the world that try out new ideas and bring them the results—and the universities are able to solve problems directly with some of the greatest minds in the field.
• Short-term benefits help to cement commitment. The universities see benefit as soon as they implement Liberated Learning in the classroom. IBM has had at least one immediate benefit as well. Much audio content on the Web is not captioned—and captioning by traditional methods would be prohibitively expensive. Through CaptionMeNow, an IBM application made possible thanks to Liberated Learning developments, IBM has a strong tool to meet this large market need.
• Intellectual excitement is high. A continuous flow of new findings and new challenges keeps all partners focused and committed. Knowing that they have tremendous intellectual resources in their IBM partners, Liberated Learning’s university partners aggressively explore and define problems and identify priorities—which, in turn, enables IBM to make the product more accurate and with more and better features. “Because of the involvement of IBM, our partners are excited about it, they want to improve it,” says David Leitch. “They know they’ve got the support of the crème de la crème.”
• Project growth keeps the learning from getting stale. IBM’s living lab grows more active as partners are added. Each partner thinks about the project in his or her own way, and each brings new ideas, different philosophies and theories, and different needs to a discussion that continues daily.
• Honest disagreement is coupled with a need to cooperate. Across the wires and in annual meetings, dissent and disagreements fuel a positive examination and often heated discourse. “Finally, the group always strives to come to consensus. We determine annual R&D priorities after a great deal of discussion, but we determine them as a group,” says Keith Bain.
• Individual champions are on both sides of the partnership, backed by supporting levels of leadership. The triad of Basson, Leitch, and Bain have been leading the project since the collaboration began. They understand and highly value the project, they understand and trust one another, their working styles are compatible (everyone works hard), and they have become friends. This individual-based leadership could make the project vulnerable, but Basson has effectively advocated within IBM to make connections with others and to make them see the advantages of this project, and Leitch and Bain have begun to establish leader schools among the partners (these leader schools provide guidance and technical support, especially important for sites like those in the south Pacific, many time zones distant from the initiative's base in Nova Scotia). By encouraging and enabling others to take on leadership they not only add new intellectual resources, but ensure that the project would continue and thrive even if, by some unfortunate chance, one of its three founding champions were to be lost.
• Participants view this as a special mission. To program participants, their hard work is justified because the ends are socially important. Sara Basson describes the Atlantic Centre as a place that wanted to offer “students with disabilities the same experience that was available to students without disabilities.” It’s important, too, because it’s so powerfully innovative. “People can see the future when they see this in action,” says Keith Bain. “We all believe that someday this will be everywhere, as ubiquitous as a blackboard. Because of that, we’re all willing to live on that edge, with its wins and its losses.”