Though they travel all over Scotland, the friendly folk who work in the Scottish RSCs rarely step over the border in the course of their professional work. However, fame and fortune beckoned from Spain this month when Sarah Price and Kenji Lamb from RSC Scotland North & East were invited to Barcelona to pick up an accolade for AccessApps.
The occasion was the annual conference hosted by the IMS Global Learning Consortium and AccessApps is a project which had caught the judges’ eye.
In case you haven’t yet heard of it, AccessApps is all about accessible, portable applications. Why portable? Because you can freely download them from our website onto a USB stick and always have them with you, wherever you go. Why accessible? Because some of the applications are designed to cater for some individuals’ specific learning needs; for example, they may need to see the screen more clearly, or be able to control a computer without using a keyboard or mouse. Instead of having to ask, wonder, or worry, learners (or staff, for that matter) who need these tools can always have access to them through a tiny device that can be kept in the pocket; they can be deployed on any Windows computer with a free USB slot to give them the learning environment that they need.
Not all of the more than 60 applications on AccessApps are for people with additional needs, but they are all without exception portable, and all without exception FREE. That’s because they’ve been designed by developers throughout the world on either open source or freeware licences. Just as YouTube doesn’t ‘own’ all the videos that are on its site, neither does the RSC own all the educational applications on its AccessApps portal. You know, however, that while the quality of stuff on YouTube may vary wildly, the educational apps that comprise AccessApps are vouched by us to be highest quality and appropriate for further and higher education.
So back in Barcelona in early May, the RSC was delighted to win the category ‘Best Accessible Solution’, following that up this week with a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Guardian newspaper’s national ‘Excellence in Public Sector IT’ Awards.
AccessApps is actively supported by all UK RSCs and also by JISC TechDis. It’s proving so popular that RSC Scotland North & East is now exploring how the idea can be pushed further with two additional strands: LearnApps and TeachApps, under the general family name of EduApps. As the name implies, LearnApps is good for anyone who is a learner; TeachApps for anyone who is a teacher or lecturer.
Well done and well deserved to the AccessApps creators! Very good to see such a great resource highly praised at an international gathering.