Open educational repository features for Brazilian sign language users

The research aims to identify the characteristics that an open educational repository should have in order to meet the information needs of deaf students and those able to hear, participating in the Languages and Brazilian sign language course in distance education mode from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. The specific objectives were: a) describing the profile of the deaf and those able to hear; b) analyzing the use of information technology by students; and c) identifying documents that a repository should provide to meet the information needs of students. This work is classified as an investigative and descriptive study with a qualitative and quantitative approach, and analysis was performed with descriptive statistics and content analysis. In order to achieve the proposed objectives a questionnaire was applied to 98 students - deaf and able to hear participating in the Languages and Libras course. It was concluded that students use e-mail, discussion lists, Messenger, video sharing tools, and sites for deaf people. Students consider word processors, Messenger, Movie Maker, Media Player, and spreadsheets to be very important. Deaf students consider video-lessons, dictionaries and booklets; and students able to hear consider video-lessons, books and booklets to be the most important documents. News about deaf people, Brazilian sign language, translation, technology, linguistics, Portuguese learning, medical-legal interpretation and deaf culture are main topics requested by the students. Dictionaries, videos, digital books and articles are means requested by the students for accessing the information. Students prefer to have access to the information in the repository using the sign language, subtitles and in Portuguese.