TELS: A Voice-Response Internet-Based Learning System

During the last decade the academic world is continuously capitalizing on the use of Internet and web-based learning solutions, because of the simplicity and immediacy in creating, organizing and managing educational material and student data. However, the delivery of educational content to the end-user is characterized by visual presentation and the requirement of some sort of access either wired or wireless to the Internet, which blocks visually impaired individuals or people who don't have access to the Internet in one way or another from accessing educational content. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Internet Telephony Learning System (TELS). Besides all other, TELS exploits mature Internet/web standards and the most popular communication mean in the world, the telephone, to provide audio interactivity between an otherwise traditional web application and the end-user. Unlike other similar applications, TELS does not need any special software or hardware to be accessed and since it is an open source traditional web application it can be custom-tailored to the individual needs of each institution. Since it is accessible to almost every communication device, we argue that it is useful for visually impaired, technologically uneducated, and underprivileged people for accessing information originally intended to be accessed visually via a Personal Computer.