DISTANCE HIGHER EDUCATION AND DEAF AND DISABLE STUDENTS: THE TEACHING ROLE AND AN INTERACTIVE FRAMEWORK FOR LEARNING AND TEACHING ENHANCEMENT

Disabilities (e.g., mental, body, hearing, and seeing disabilities) prevent many students from continuing their higher education degrees. The main reason behind this situation is that the learning environments of the higher education institutions, especially traditional universities and colleges, are not capable to teach disabled students. In other words, they do not possess the means and tools and teaching and learning methodologies which are necessary for teaching disabled students.

Despite this general judgment of the situations of the higher education institutions, distance education universities and colleges might be more capable to teach disabled students more than the traditional institutions. Distance education institutions use multiple technologies that might be appropriate for different kind of disabilities.

Examples of the used technologies of distance education are the printed interactive textbooks, multimedia that has different kind of effects, and information technologies. These technologies help the distance education institutions to meet the learning needs of the different disabilities of disabled students, and thus enable them to gain their higher education degrees.

The success of distance education institutions to offer educational programs to the disabled students requires an interactive teaching framework, that has its own input, process, and outputs. The most important input is the skill qualifications of these students in the public schools before they come to the university. This public education should enable them with necessary reading and writing skills.

This paper discusses the ways that help distance education institutions to teach disabled students, especially deaf students. The paper, also suggests an interactive fromwork that increases productivities of these institutions in teaching these kinds of students, and illustrates some examples of successful distance education institutions in the experience of teaching disabled students.