AccessLearn Introductory Survey Results 3: Emerging Technologies Opportunities and Challenges

Hi all

In this third post, I’m reporting on emerging technologies, and challenges and opportunities they bring to accessible online learning. There were some clusters of responses, but also a wide range of technologies, not all of which could be considered emerging, that were listed.

Opportunities:
* automated captioning tools
* tools to support creation of accessible online learning resources 
* MOOCs
* Mobile devices/bring your own device
* digital textbooks
* Instant communication systems
* Personalisation and accessibility metadata; learning analytics
* modern design/development approaches (e.g simplification of design, responsive design)
* Universal Design for Learning

Challenges:
* MOOCs
* Mobile devices/bring your own device
* Video for educational purposes, and processes and tools for captioning video, whether in-house, learner-generated or third-party. Related to this was lecture capture video.
* Constantly changing LMSs, and resultant loss or change in accessibility support and AT support; the relationship of this to business models of commercial LMS vendors was also cited.
* Tools for creating accessible STEM resources (diagrams, charts etc) 
* Gamification and edutainment
* Collaborative content creation tools
* Wearable technology

Comments:
* Some challenges are related to long-standing accessibility issues, which do not yet seem to have been adequately tackled in an educational context
* Some technologies were considered opportunities and challenges! In particular, MOOCs, mobile devices/bring your own device; and also Google Apps for Education and Flash

Method:
* These were two free text questions, asking participants to name one emerging technology considered to present the biggest opportunity for accessible online learning, and one emerging technology considered to present the biggest challenge to accessible online learning.
* 38 participants answered the “biggest opportunity” question.
* 42 participants answered the “biggest challenge” question.

Dave

David Sloan

UX Research Lead
The Paciello Group
dsloan@paciellogroup.com

Received on Friday, 31 July 2015 22:02:23 UTC