The Experience of BMSTU’s Teachers on Remote Teaching Chemistry of Hearing Impaired Students in the Pandemic

Abstract

This paper considers the experience of Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU) teachers on remote teaching chemistry hearing-impaired students under pandemic conditions. The key challenge for these students in a general-type university with a verbal form of teaching is the content accessibility of fundamental engineering disciplines, including chemistry. The statutory activity of BMSTU guarantees vocational rehabilitation for this category of students through inclusive education programs and special learning conditions, taking into account the individual limitations due to hearing impairment. Special face-to-face conditions provide an accessible learning environment through digital transformation of classrooms, the use of individual and group audiological facilities as well as supplementary cognitive-technological chemistry course accompanying the basic chemistry discipline. In the pandemic conditions, teachers were faced with the challenge of transferring face-to-face chemistry courses into a content-accessible format of webinars. Principles of designing webinars in chemistry for these students include taking into account their cognitive features of information perception in virtual environment; creating multimodal developmental environment in webinars; designing special teaching materials for classes using cognitive technologies and an interdisciplinary approach considering UDL guidelines. It is shown that the process of teaching chemistry to deaf and hearing impaired students in specially designed conditions for webinars develops their cognitive abilities and does not reduce their motivation to effectively acquire the university program in the discipline. Webinar technology provides them with the opportunity to master new relevant skills. These findings have been confirmed by the students’ results in chemistry in distance learning conditions compared to the results in face-to-face learning conditions