A Scoping Review on Open Educational Resources to Support Interactions of Learners with Disabilities

Abstract

This scoping review explored the trends in open educational resources (OER) that support the interactions of learners with disabilities and the challenges of supporting these interactions in such environments. Emerging OER and open educational practices allow learners to interact with digital learning resources in self-regulated learning. Since OER assume learners’ self-regulation, research has explored how to promote learner interactions to facilitate better engagement and motivation. Emerging research on OER-enabled pedagogy corroborate this trend. However, despite increasing interest in OER and open educational practices, few studies have demonstrated how OER support various types of interactions for learners with disabilities. Learners with disabilities are likely to experience challenges in interacting with OER due to their modality constraints. A comprehensive literature synthesis is essential to investigate the needs of learners with disabilities in their interactions in OER. In this study, we reviewed and synthesized existing research on how OER and open educational practices support the interactions of learners with disabilities across different OER platforms. Our findings suggest both research and design implications for future OER designs suited for learners with disabilities.

How Equitable, Diverse, and Inclusive Are Open Educational Resources and Other Affordable Course Materials?

“…The design of OER itself can also hinder students' use of the materials. In terms of accessibility for students with disabilities, two recent reviews of studies on accessibility and OER demonstrated that OER still needs improvements (Moon & Park, 2021;Zhang et al, 2020). Zhang et al (2020) noted that the highest percentage of errors in OER were due to compatibility problems with assistive devices and operating systems.…”

Accessibility Challenges in OER and MOOC: MLR Analysis Considering the Pandemic Years

“…Some works [40,41] propose the application of Universal Design Learning (UDL). Several existing investigations on OER tend to focus on the evaluation of accessibility and usability, little attention has been paid to support the participation of students with disabilities in OER that according to the principles of UDL consider the participation of the student through of various representations [42].…”

“…The wide range of disabilities, the variability in learning, and their modes of interaction [34] suggest performing deeper analyses of the wide variety of assistive technology and their technical issues [24,48] fed back to the user experience by developing a holistic approach [51] and measuring the scope and subsequent benefits of those involved [30]. OER-based pedagogy is proposed as future research, for which, [42] points out the importance of collecting information on related instructional practices, where learning experiences are deepened.…”

Potential ethical problems in the creation of open educational resources through virtual spaces in academia

“…There are many different OER virtual platforms and web-based OER, such as open courseware, a computing application, massive open online courses (MOOCs), social media, institutional repository, and many more ( Moon and Park, 2021 ). All these platforms promote interconnectedness globally for open access and collaboration.…”