In order to change the reality of deaf exclusion at schools and universities, we have created the first online Bilingual Education course, Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) and Portuguese. Our aim is to train teachers to work with deaf students all over Brazil. Since universities don’t promote access to deaf students, we have made a partnership with 12 renowned public institutions of higher education distributed around the country’s five macroregions.
In this course, everything is developed for the deaf student: the virtual learning environment, the physical structure of presential classrooms, and the bilingual teaching materials.
Due to being a hybrid course (that combines online - offline lessons), presential meetings are boosted by our own technology of room setting, where students work collaboratively sharing the same computers’ screens. All course teaching materials are produced in Sign Language – not adapted from Portuguese or produced with Brazilian Sign Language translation window. Therefore, we have taken Brazilian Sign Language to the next level.
The process of developing bilingual teaching materials focuses on creating learning digital objects, which are prepared by a multidisciplinary team of university teachers, educational designers, translator-interpreters, graphic designers, and studio staff.
Our hybrid educational proposal is based on a collective building of the knowledge and a constant interaction among students, mediator-teachers, and the virtual environment – always oriented by the subject-hypermedia-subject relationship. The Virtual Learning Environment is completely bilingual and navigable through sign language. It has been designed focusing on deaf student learning and it's based on graphic representations that are self-contained, and on the Sign Language itself. In order to place deaf students in the vanguard of educational methods, we have produced an innovative methodological approach.

Institutional Project Video: https://youtu.be/aPrjihr9YdM

https://neoines.com.br

• Brazil

• Youth
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• People with disabilities
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities
• Deaf People

In 2018, project counts on 13 partner public institutions spread all over Brazil:
- 10 universities (Amazonas Federal University, Ceará Federal University, Bahia Federal University, Grande Dourados Federal University, Rio Grande do Sul Federal University, Paraná Federal University, Paraíba Federal University, São Paulo Federal University, Pará State University, Lavras Federal University);
- 3 federal institutes (Goiás Federal Institute, Santa Catarina Federal Institute, Deaf Education National Institute).
In this implemented actual model, not considering the project expansion, we will graduate 1440 bilingual teachers each year able to receive deaf students in the first teaching years. However, our expectation for the next years is to increase significantly the partnerships number.
For 2019, we intend to implement the course in 100 zones. Thus, we will graduate in the next 5 years tens of thousands of bilingual teachers.
Our main goal is to spread over the world a teaching and learning methodology for deaf students with bilingual teaching materials developed specifically to this public and also disseminate the tools created for the bilingual platform (VLE) in other countries, with other sign languages.
As a result, we aim to increase the training project of bilingual teachers considering the several sign languages in all countries.

Nowadays, there are practically no bilingual teachers to train students in the first school years in Brazil. After implementing the project, deaf students will be integrated to the teaching systems, because we will have bilingual teachers able to teach by means of sign language. According to the last data of Geography and Statistics Brazilian Institute’s Demographic Census (IBGE), there are about 9.7 million of people with hearing impairment, what represents approximately 5.1% of Brazilian population. Our researches based on the microdata of Anísio Teixeira Study and Educational Researches National Institute (INEP) about the overview of deaf students’ schooling in higher education show that only 1.650 deaf students are enrolled in higher education in Brazil and 27.527 are enrolled in elementary education, representing less than 0.001% of the enrollments.