EPALE - Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe

My name is Katharina Hartmann, I am responsible for research monitoring and international networking at the registered German charity Mother Hood e.V., a small but impactful parents organization around pregnancy, childbirth, and the first year of life with a newborn. 
Mother Hood advocates for equity, choices, and respectful maternity care since our founding in 2015. One key action is to provide people with high-quality information to enable them to make informed choices based on their individual needs. I also happen to be a teacher who is enthusiastic about the opportunities, creative apps and great tools that web-based learning offers to learners across the lifespan.

In my last ePale Blog Post, dating from February 2022, I reported on the first part of the highly stimulating ERASMUS+ Small Scale Partnership with our Croatian “sister organization” RODA - Parents in Action. I also reported on the challenges we faced while writing web content suitable for text-to-audio-apps, and some important minimal details in order to render the voiceover more comprehensible (like the power of using a ; instead of a . ). Shortly before the ending of our project, on November 2, 2023, I would like to give an up-date on our outcomes and some more language-based challenges of designing more inclusive web-based Adult Education and outline ideas for future projects.

Enabling different language users: Using automatic translation features

On June 2, the two brand-new German courses went live. It took the German team and the programmers until September to tackle the last technical problems concerning the automated translation features, but now the courses work for all kinds of different in-built translation apps, of different browers, on all kinds of different devices. This means that by enabling the in-built automated translation feature, people without knowledge of the German language can now inform themselves on what it is like to give birth to a baby in Germany, from a peer-to-peer perspective (www.kurse.mother-hood.de  “Geburts Guide”). The second course (www.kurse.mother-hood.de  “Wochenbett Guide”) talks about the time after giving birth and the challenges that new mothers and couples face during the first time with a newborn. The same translation principles work for the Croatian courses which were re-launched on a new LMS over the summer and can be reached via https://edukacija.roda.hr ( “Priprema za porod”  and “Priprema za babinje”)

Some of the information given in the courses is not specific to the German, respective Croatian, context, e.g. information on post-partum mental health. But a large part gives specific information on the respective (health) system: Where to find help, which routine interventions are typically done in hospitals etc. The courses have hence the potential to give access to important information for the many migrant mothers in Germany and Croatia – always from the users’ and peer-to-peer perspective.

Our backends show that the courses reach the language minorities: In a short survey upon registration for the courses, we ask users if they use a language that is different from the default one. The German backend shows that users ticked that box, some specifying their languages, e.g. Russian and Thai.

Another minority that we wanted to enable to use the courses are people using text-to-audio app. In the five months since the launch of the course, we have not have any feedback from people making use of that. But we did get a message from a hearing impaired pregnant woman:

Huhu, eine Frage gibt es zu Video auch Untertitel oder sowas ähnliches? Bin selbst taub und unsicher ob es für mich lohnt. Wäre super wenn ne Rückmeldung gibt ❤️

[Hello, a question: is there also subtitles or something like that to video? I am deaf myself and unsure if it is worth it for me. Would be great to get feedback ❤️]

Making the video content available to people unable to hear proved much easier for the German team than for the Croatian one. For the German courses we could profit from existing tools: We integrated subtitles into the video files and host the video content on YouTube. Thereby the content is not only accessible to be read in German, but by enabling the automated subtitle translation there, the content is now also readable in the many different languages integrated into the YouTube subtitle translation tool. The translations offered by that tool are by no means perfect, but good enough to understand the central information of the videos. For the Croatian courses, unfortunately no such useful feature “to piggy-back” exists.

The deaf person quoted above got back to the German team a while later:

Hii, ja ich habe bei beiden Modulen durch gemacht und ich fand es super da es viel Text ist 🥰🥰 bzw bei Video auch Untertitel gibt (…). Aber für mich war es super das ich in Ruhe lesen konnte und immer wenn ich Zeit dazu habe.

[Hii, yes I have done both modules and I found it great because it is a lot of text 🥰🥰 or in video also subtitles (...). But for me it was great that I could read in peace and whenever I have time.]

It is extremely rewarding to know that our work reaches its audience and to get positive feedback concerning our efforts for inclusiveness.

Towards more inclusiveness: Plans for the future

In the courses that were part of the ERASMUS+ project, we opted for a friendly, often playful relationship-oriented language to emphasize the peer-to-peer aspect. We also took an effort to optimize it for translation tools as well as hearing and vision impaired people. But the linguistic register used is often rather complex and hypotactic, hence possibly proving a barrier for people in need of less complex, more direct language. We were well aware of this, but opted to first focus on the three goals outlined above (peer-to-peer, hearing and vision impaired audiences). The old marketing truth: “if it is for everyone it is for no one” held true also for choosing a linguistic register, so we felt the need to create a variety of courses, not a “one size fits all”. The German team is currently working on a way to develop versions of the courses in Plain Language, because we know of the need for it.

Plain Language eLearning experts wanted!

Mother Hood e.V. has a network of experts to help create the content of Plan Language courses. A different story is the presentation of the content for Plain Language users: How does a web site needs to be designed to be accessible, how do we render registration accessible from a visual point of view?

The Mother Hood eLearning team is therefore looking for organizations or individuals having expertise in designing eLearning tools for Plain Language users. Please contact me if you have expertise to share! k.hartmann((a))mother-hood.de