Accessibility Problems with Massive Open Online Courses

Park, Kim and So (2016) found problems with the accessibility of Coursera, edX, and Khan Academy for users with a disability. Particular problems found were with drop-down menus (toggled on mouse is roll-over), dynamic webpage structures (quiz  feedback without page reloading), repetitive elements (course description at the top of each page),  illogical focus movement (such as back to top of screen not to next item). Many of the problems appear to be with quizzes. Also the mobile versions of the interface were less accessible than the PC based versions. Also user comments appeared to favor down-loadable content (as in more conventional distance education courses).

What the authors did not address is if Learning Management Systems, such as Moodle, which are not designed for MOOCs, have more accessible interfaces.

Reference

Park, K., Kim, H. J., & So, H. J. (2016, January). Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Really Open to Everyone?: A Study of Accessibility Evaluation from the Perspective of Universal Design for Learning. In Proceedings of HCI Korea (pp. 29-36). Hanbit Media, Inc. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.17210/hcik.2016.01.29

Role of For-fee Low Cost Educational Instutions

Wired magazine has an article "Pop-Up Schools Could Radically Improve Global Education" by Dayo Olopade in its December 2013 education. Normally I don't read Wired, finding it a jumble of naive enthusiasm for "new" technology which is barely distinguishable from the advertising. But this article on the Bridge International Academies was of interest. These are, from my limited reading, are non-government schools for developing nations which use a centralised Internet based administration and course materials. It would be interesting to see how much this model of education could be extended to higher level, blended mode, vocational education, perhaps using Khan Academy materials. I was only able to find about 25 papers which mention Bridge.