Digital equity and accessible MOOCs: Accessibility evaluations of mobile MOOCs for learners with visual impairments

Abstract

Despite the popular claim that massive open online courses (MOOCs) can democratise educational opportunities, this study suggests that current MOOC platforms are not designed to be accessible and inclusive for learners with disabilities. Our main goals in this study were to identify the needs and barriers that learners with visual impairments face when learning with mobile devices in MOOCs and to make recommendations for designing MOOCs that are more accessible and inclusive. We conducted this study in two phases: a user study (Phase I) and a heuristic walkthrough (Phase II). In Phase I, we conducted a user study with three university students with visual impairments to identify their needs and the barriers to learning that they encounter in mobile MOOC platforms. In Phase II, five evaluators conducted a heuristic walkthrough based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (World Wide Web Consortium, 2008) to examine the degree of accessibility of a MOOC platform. Overall, the results indicate that serious accessibility issues exist in MOOC platforms, preventing learners with visual impairments from fully participating in learning activities. We conclude this paper by recommending ways to design mobile MOOCs to make them more accessible for learners with visual impairments.

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

“…Despite attention to OER and OER-enabled pedagogy, studies have rarely investigated how existing OER and open educational practices can embrace learners with disabilities and how they can promote their interactions. In terms of digital equity, research has failed to identify clearly the contextual challenges that learners with disabilities face when using OER (Park et al, 2019;Willems & Bossu, 2012). Considering such challenges, we noticed a possible discrepancy between OER designs and learners' disabilities, which may interrupt the expansion of OER-enabled pedagogy for learners with disabilities.…”

“…OER include various types of educational materials for teaching, learning, or assessment, such as textbooks and digital toolkits that consider human modalities (e.g., video and narrations). Since OER focus on the openness of learning resources, OER can contribute to digital equity (Park et al, 2019). Digital equity indicates that each learner has an equal opportunity to access and experience learning resources without physical constraints (Solomon, 2002).…”

“…Digital equity denotes a learner's right to access educational resources without barriers. Prior research has explored how to embrace learners with disabilities through OER as a practice of digital equity (Park et al, 2019;Treviranus, 2018). Research on OER for learners with disabilities have been rooted in two concepts: accessibility and universal design for learning (UDL; Spencer, 2011;Spooner et al, 2007).…”

2020 vision: What happens next in education technology research in Australia

“…The research focuses on the potential of these tools to gain insight into the relationships between learning and teaching (e.g. (Brooker et al, 2018;Thompson et al, 2013), examining the impact of MOOCS on accessibility (Park et al, 2019), learning analytics for students (Kitto et al, 2017), and implementation in classrooms (Prieto et al, 2019). Best practice and the influence of video for education is still under discussion (Fyfield et al, 2019).…”

A qualitative study to understand the perspectives of MOOC providers on accessibility

“…Law et al (2013) reported that substantial numbers of learners with accessibility needs are using open educational resources (OER) and MOOCs. However, there is limited research on how MOOCs are designed to consider accessibility and the diverse needs of their learners (Ingavélez-Guerra et al, 2020;Park et al, 2019;Sanchez-Gordon & Luján-Mora, 2017;Zhang et al, 2020).…”