Collaborative approach for improving the audiovisual accessibility of Open Education

Abstract

Over the past few years, Open Education has experienced a tremendous growth, online learning platforms “titans” such as Coursera, Edx, Udacity, are able to attract millions of users on daily basis to study in their virtual environment. On the one hand, Open Education as a revolutionary phenomenon have changed completely the way of learning, while on the other hand, the high dropout rate of online courses is continuously considered as a big problem, around 90% of online learners end up not finishing the course they registered. Current online learning platforms always buy into a one-fit-all approach which neglect the heterogeneity of students and fail to provide a perceivable social environment for self-directed learning. Recently, the number of studies on the accessibility of Open Education is increasing distinctly, however, there is not enough impact in the research community. Previous researches only focused on the architecture or the physical environment of platforms instead of paying attention to the content itself, which in this sense, fundamentally the audiovisual content. Moreover, most of those studies only addressed the technological aspect of accessibility issues, including the use of specification, standards and design principles, etc. The research goal of this paper is to highlight the audiovisual accessibility of Open Education and make it better through collaborative activities supported by the power of online community and social network.