Assessing Practical Accessibility in Online Courses Based on Local Conditions

Abstract

Another approach to exploring online learning data is to see what is not there or what is absent. One use case for this is “practical accessibility” or the accessibility accommodations in online learning courses (or learning objects). This chapter includes a review of the current extant literature, a close-in analysis of several dozen real-world courses (in static format) through an instructional design/developer lens, in service of the following objectives: 1) the drafting of an initial instrument that may be used to assess the accessibility level of an online learning course or digital learning object, 2) the identification of the most common accessibility issues in online courses at a Midwestern university (based on a sample setoff online courses), and 3) the identification of a model course with full or near-full accessibility and seeing what may be learned from that and from specific accessibility accommodations that may be beneficial in other contexts.