An investigation into the perspectives of providers and learners on MOOC accessibility

An effective open eLearning environment should consider the target learner’s abilities, learning goals, where learning takes place, and which specific device(s) the learner uses. MOOC platforms struggle to take these factors into account and typically are not accessible, inhibiting access to environments that are intended to be open to all. A series of research initiatives are described that are intended to benefit MOOC providers in achieving greater accessibility and disabled learners to improve their lifelong learning and re-skilling. In this paper, we first outline the rationale, the research questions, and the methodology. The research approach includes interviews, online surveys and a MOOC accessibility audit; we also include factors such the risk management of the research programme and ethical considerations when conducting research with vulnerable learners. Preliminary results are presented from interviews with providers and experts and from analysis of surveys of learners. Finally, we outline the future research opportunities. This paper is framed within the context of the Doctoral Consortium organised at the TEEM'17 conference

What do MOOC providers think about accessibility?

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become an accepted way to make learning opportunities available at large scale and low cost to the learner. However, only if these are made accessible will they be able to offer the 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. 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/designers and MOOC accessibility researchers. Our results show 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 disabled learners

Model for democratisation of the contents hosted in MOOCs

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a new educational tool in higher education, based on gratuity, massiveness and ubiquity. Essentially they suggest an evolution of the Open Learning Movement based on principles of reusing, revising, remixing and redistributing open educational resources (OER). However, in contrast with the content of OERs, content hosed in MOOCs tends to be paywalled and copyrighted, which restricts its reuse. Philosophically, the main problem with MOOCs is the inaccessibility and inadaptability of their resources, challenging democratic open access to knowledge. A number of authors and organisations consider it an ultimate necessity to open up MOOC resources. Therefore in this paper three strategies to open up MOOC contents are proposed: to deposit the materials in repositories of OER (ROER) as individual objects, to archive them in ROER in data packages as learning units or to convert them into OpenCourseWare (OCW) as self-taught courses

YourMOOC4all: a MOOCs inclusive design and useful feedback research project

User feedback can be of great value for the development of guidelines to design MOOC platforms, courses, and open educational resources. Considering other learners’ experiences may benefit the development of course recommender systems that consider not only the quality of the content but also the level of accessibility to address disabled learners needs. In this paper a novel design for a recommender website is introduced which collects user feedback requests for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), offering the possibility to freely rate the taken courses following Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. The development of this website, which is currently in a pilot process by UNED, will gather valuable information directly from the learners themselves to improve aspects such as the educational quality, accessibility, and usability of this open learning environment advising about the missing means regarding inclusive design

Quality in MOOCs: Surveying the Terrain

The purpose of this review is to identify quality measures and to highlight some of the tensions surrounding notions of quality, as well as the need for new ways of thinking about and approaching quality in MOOCs. It draws on the literature on both MOOCs and quality in education more generally in order to provide a framework for thinking about quality and the different variables and questions that must be considered when conceptualising quality in MOOCs. The review adopts a relativist approach, positioning quality as a measure for a specific purpose. The review draws upon Biggs’s (1993) 3P model to explore notions and dimensions of quality in relation to MOOCs — presage, process and product variables — which correspond to an input–environment–output model. The review brings together literature examining how quality should be interpreted and assessed in MOOCs at a more general and theoretical level, as well as empirical research studies that explore how these ideas about quality can be operationalised, including the measures and instruments that can be employed. What emerges from the literature are the complexities involved in interpreting and measuring quality in MOOCs and the importance of both context and perspective to discussions of quality

Auditing the accessibility of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

The outcome from the research being reported in this paper is the design of an accessibility audit to evaluate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for accessibility and to arrive at solutions and adaptations that can meet user needs. This accessibility audit includes expert-based heuristic evaluations and user-based evaluations of the MOOC platforms and individual courses

Massive open online course completion rates revisited: Assessment, length and attrition

This analysis is based upon enrolment and completion data collected for a total of 221 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It extends previously reported work (Jordan, 2014) with an expanded dataset; the original work is extended to include a multiple regression analysis of factors that affect completion rates and analysis of attrition rates during courses. Completion rates (defined as the percentage of enrolled students who completed the course) vary from 0.7% to 52.1%, with a median value of 12.6%. Since their inception, enrolments on MOOCs have fallen while completion rates have increased. Completion rates vary significantly according to course length (longer courses having lower completion rates), start date (more recent courses having higher percentage completion) and assessment type (courses using auto grading only having higher completion rates). For a sub-sample of courses where rates of active use and assessment submission across the course are available, the first and second weeks appear to be critical in achieving student engagement, after which the proportion of active students and those submitting assessments levels out, with less than 3% difference between them