Accessibility of MOOCs: Understanding the Provider Perspective

Abstract

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and with low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer flexibility of learning and benefits to all, irrespective of disability. Experience in providing accessible online learning at distance universities suggests that this can be best achieved through understanding different roles and the options in planning for adjustments to be made. To effectively apply similar approaches to MOOCs, it is necessary to understand the various viewpoints and roles of stakeholders and how these impact on accessibility. This includes educators who create materials and facilitate learning, and technologists who develop and maintain platforms. In this paper, we report the results from a study involving semi-structured interviews to investigate the perceptions and accessibility-related processes of MOOC platform accessibility managers, platform software developers and designers, and MOOC accessibility researchers. Our results show the awareness that MOOCs can be valuable for disabled learners, and indicate that legislation acts as a driver for accessibility. However, our investigations suggest limited progress to date in either producing universally accessible MOOCs, or tailoring MOOCs to meet the needs of individual learners with disabilities.

What are the Expectations of Disabled Learners when Participating in a MOOC?

“…Look to introduce and utilise comparable survey approaches across platforms  Analyse further sources of data that describe the activity of learners inside the MOOC.  Undertake a qualitative interview study of learners, building on a recent interview study of providers and stakeholders [5], to capture the disabled learners' experiences with MOOCs in depth. This study will be useful to understand in detail the accessibility issues learners may be facing in MOOCs.…”

“…The quantitative study reported in this paper is a part of a wider research programme to investigate the current accessibility of MOOCs, the processes through which this accessibility is achieved, and the potential use of data to improve MOOC accessibility [4,5]. This particular study aims to understand the current expectations of disabled learners when taking part in MOOCs.…”

“…Research that considers MOOCs and accessibility directly is limited, and more needs to be done to understand disabled learner perspectives [5]. Learner analytics and survey data have been explored as a means to identify accessibility problems in online distance courses [3], but such approaches have yet to be applied to MOOCs.…”

Understanding Accessibility as a Process through the Analysis of Feedback from Disabled Students

“…While organisations differ, it is to be expected that there are multiple stakeholders who play different roles in achieving accessibility [10,14,22]. A challenge is for feedback comments to reach those who should understand or act on them in the most effective ways.…”

“…Research has described how responsibility for accessibility in educational institutions is spread across many roles, including disability support staff, technologists, those responsible for creating materials, convening courses, and management [10,22]. For effective practice to occur, responsibility for accessibility should be embedded into institutional cultures [22,24].…”